How To Publish Your Articles: The Basics of Scientific Writing
Academic writing and publishing is an imperative skill of a scientist. Over a million scientific articles get published each year in innumerable journals, and the scientific knowledge is only growing larger. iGEM sees thousands of young enthusiastic participants innovating with creative projects, and writing scientific articles is one of the essence of communicating their discoveries and experiments to the broader scientific community.
iGEM Community’s Academia and Research Network launched their Academic Publishing Workshop series to give a walkthrough of the basics of scientific writing all the way to the process of submission and publication and help scientists to share their work effectively.
The first workshop of the series was “The Basics of Scientific Writing” by Dr. Steve Kirk, a Professor at Nippon Medical School. He extensively spoke about every important criterion involved in scientific writing, like what you should do before writing, plagiarism, what each section of the article involves, and academic writing conventions and also provided an exhaustive and extensive set of resources that can help students communicate their research in a constructive yet comprehensive manner. Watch the whole workshop here (Link)
Some excerpts:
While talking about what you should do before writing he suggested checking the journal for word limit, formatting, structure and reference style.
He explained that taking someone’s idea and pretending you thought of it yourself, forgetting to cite something that came from another source, using someone’s clever writing as if you thought of it, word-to-word copy (even with citation) would all be considered as plagiarism.
He also emphasised to not use quotations - except definitions to justify everything you write in a paper.
He discussed what each section of the article involves including Main - Introduction (What is the study and why was it done?), Materials & Methods (How was the study done?), Results (What did the study find? - Factual!) and Discussions (What do the results mean?-Interpretation)
Resources:
The iGEM Academia and Research Network provides a platform for our community to engage, develop a better understanding and improve their knowledge of the recent research trends in Synthetic Biology through academic-related activities. Find more about them on our website.
