2022-01-24: Quick and Easy Way to Write a Research Paper Publication

First prepare the figures

Be sure that everything has been done n=3 or more, and be sure to do the statistical analysis (t-tests to compare 2 things that have roughly normal distributions, Mann-Whitney otherwise; use ANOVA if there are three or more things you’re comparing). Something is different if p < 0.05, otherwise its not a statistically significant difference. And remember to put size bars on all the micrographs.

Then sit down with each figure and write a results paragraph for it

Results section – you can write a new paragraph every 5 minutes.  If you have writer’s block, sit down with the figures, and have someone take dictation as you answer the following questions for each figure.

The following set of sentences allows one to easily create a typical results paragraph:

• what we wanted to find out
  “To determine if ............”

• what has been done before
  “We previously observed that ...”  (these first 2 sentences can be swapped) 

• how we did the experiment (don’t give details, as these are in the Methods)
  “Baseline and xyz models are compared....” 

• what we saw, starting with a connection between the baseline and what has been done previously (if applicable)
  “As previously observed, xyz model showed a significant difference in …” 

• and then compare the models to the baseline
  “Unlike baseline model, the xyz model showed higher F1 ........”
  or
  “Compared to the baseline, xyz caused a significant increase in …” 

• what this means
  “The data suggest that xyz is ....”

Congrats, you’ve done a paragraph for your first figure!  Now repeat for all the other figures.

Then for each figure do a methods section

Pretend you are writing a lab protocol/study – list participants, apparatus, datasets, task procedures etc.,.  If there is a published paper that has the procedure in it, or you did something following the original authors directions, just reference the paper or write “..was done following the [xyz]'s directions.” 

The introduction will now be easy to write

Print out the Results and Methods sections.  Get a red pen and circle all the big words or unusual techniques, and write a simple explanation for someone not in the field.

Depending on how things sound, you can swap the paragraphs around; start with the broadest/ most important topic and narrow things down.

The Conclusion is also easy

Gather the ‘What this means sentences from the Results and glop them together for the first Conclusion paragraph. 

• “In this paper, we have shown that ……”
• Now start going through that first paragraph of the Conclusion, connecting each of the sentences to other things in the literature

Abstract

• The abstract is the very last thing you write.
• The abstract should include all the main aspects of the paper in an abbreviated form - the topic, the hypotheses, the participants and study design, and the results

At some point do the figure legends, and you’re pretty much done!

-Sam

Credit goes to Professor Richard Gomer at Texas A&M University Biology for the original writeup.