Reflections on writing my first research paper

Once you’ve done something that’s got you some results, writing up the analysis should be easy, right? After all, it’s you that’s done the work, you know why you did it, you know how you did it, you know your results and the conclusions you’ve drawn from it. So what is so difficult?!

I have no idea, but something is. I mean, it doesn’t help that I don’t “like” the writing up process, no matter how useful it can be to set things straight in my brain, but there’s something more than that.

I guess, maybe I tried to write a paper too soon after doing my results analysis? Draft 1 of my “paper” I think was probably just a word dump of the things that I had figured out/discovered from analysing my results, topped and tailed with a Background and a Conclusion.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but hey, you’ve got to start somewhere!

My supervisor sent back my “draft” with some comments, but with a meeting planned – she said it would be best to talk about it in person. She did start off by saying it had some good parts and I’m doing my best to keep that in my mind so I don’t slump into a hole of self-pity. It just needs tweaking, adding to, and rearranging.

To be honest, that’s what I’d expected though. When I sent it to her, I did say it was a very rough draft but I wanted to check if it had the right things in it and the level of detail. I didn’t see the point in spending time reformatting it, grammar-checking it, and making it flow if the right stuff wasn’t in it.

It’s weird, because I feel like somewhere inside me I knew that I needed to do the things that my supervisor pointed out to me, but I can’t for the life of me, explain why I didn’t do it to begin with. I mean, I’ve read enough journal papers to know the layout and the different sections. I also am the Editor-in-Chief of an academic journal that I set up and had to help write the authorship guidelines.

Evidently, those neurons didn’t feel the need to communicate with each other. Anyway, I’m on track now. I’ve got lots of constructive advice and I’m now re-drafting something to get something that looks a little more like it should.

I’ve come up with some steps to move forward post-meeting:

1. Find the journal I want to publish in, so I can follow their author guidelines from the off. This means no refactoring later (feels very much like how I wrote my personal statement for the university I wanted to go to, including the things they want).
2. Make notes of key rules e.g. number of words, number of figures, sections to include, etc.
3. Make the headings (as per the guidelines), put little descriptions of each section (again from the guidelines) at the top, and bullet point the key things I want to put in each section.
4. Make the bullet points more detailed bullet points with the information that you want to put in.
5. Join your bullet points in nice prose (and rearrange if need be).

That’s my 5-step plan to get a decent draft of a paper. I hope it’s right – it seems to look logical but as it’s my first one, so we’ll see. I’m sure I’ll have an update on how successful that plan is/was! If anyone reading has any tips for writing a paper, or if you have any thoughts on whether there’s a wrong way to do it, let me know in the comments – I’ll be very interested to hear/read all contributions.

Shruti Turner (@ShrutiTurner) is a PhD Researcher at Imperial College London. This story was published on January 24, 2019, on Shruti’s blog, Shruti’s PhD (available here), and has been republished here with her permission.