How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper

Great book at a great price.

I purchased this book bc MIT's engineering writing class included it in the syllabus. I found it so general as to be unhelpful. I wanted help with explaining to my students how to structure an article, how to write topic sentences that lead a reader through a paper, etc. The chapter on how to write results is 4 pages and offers tips like 'avoid redundancy.' I spent $45 on this book that I won't be able to use at all in helping coach my (engineering) research group write better papers.

For any scientist, communication is a central part of the game. Yet many scientists did not major in English, nor did they receive great educational training about the field. Usually, they were focusing on their science. To compound matters, most graduate programs not at top research centers provide sparse resources to educate researchers. To supplement such a linguistic shortcoming, this book, laudably in its ninth edition, seeks to introduce the field to the scientific community. It discusses most forms of scientific communication generally, but as the title implies, it focuses efforts on the publication process. I am currently composing my first self-generated scientific paper as primary author. Yay! I’m using this book (and a few others) to supplement a writing group of likeminded scientists. This book brought to mind a few insights that would improve my manuscript through a deeper understanding of the overall process. Although I regularly converse with scientific communicators, this book helped me see the entire publication journey from start to finish. Doing good science is itself tough. So is writing well. This book teaches readers how to combine these two skills into useful products. It also has a chapter at the end about a career in scientific communications, which is generally highly compensated. Science is a team endeavor, and communicating its results with the public and with peers is itself a difficult challenge. It offers a kind of “last mile problem” like that seen with vaccine technology in public health. Writers must bring the findings to readers’ attention lest they die an unfulfilled death. The authors’ insights here help advance that noble cause.