Five Keys to Producing More and Better Scientific Papers

Scientific papers are the currency of academia. The dream paper tells a compelling story and answers a deep question conclusively. Because it fundamentally shifts the field, it gets cited hundreds of times and its authors get invited to present at authoritative conferences and work with experts from all over the world.

For most of us, however, scientific writing is a slow and painful process. We can’t all be nobel prize winners of course, but there certainly are methods we could adopt that will all but guarantee higher quality papers in less time. Academics are famously known for their ability — habit even — to burn the midnight oil. As romantic as this may be, it often comes at a high price of physical, mental and social wellness. Therefore, becoming a more efficient scientist could quite literally be life saving. Below are five keys to producing more and better scientific papers, and doing less overtime.

How often can you say with confidence that you are the smartest or the most experienced person in the team? If you can, make your team bigger and ask again. The point is that we arrive at better analysis plans, produce more insightful graphics and write clearer paragraphs when we do it as a team. The downside of course is that collaborative work requires jointly agreed rules about roles and responsibilities, and modes of engagements. For example, code review by a more experienced colleague can expose and correct errors and boost the readability of the code, but if not adequately regulated it can also be the reason for being held hostage in a tug of war over irrelevant style preferences. Sharing data, code and manuscripts also means that you need a method to handle the madness that is version control. The last thing you want is to have an untold number of different versions of the dataset, scripts and manuscript drafts floating around on various local hard drives and cloud platforms. Git is the standard for version control of code and has become a mission-critical skill for productive scientists. DVC is a git-like tool for version control of data. With Google’s G Suite, Overleaf and Microsoft’s Office 365, you really don’t have an excuse anymore for emailing manuscripts around.

Humans are visual creatures. I might not remember the exact numbers, but I can still picture the figures of key papers that caused a breakthrough in my understanding. Graphics can be used to show the conceptual framework and logical reasoning behind the hypotheses under investigation, they can bring the raw data to life, and they can turn abstract model inferences into insightful visualisations of their meaning and implications. It is often possible and a good idea to free-hand sketch what you think the key figures of the paper might look like. It’s a guaranteed boost of your confidence when you guessed correctly, and an opportunity to learn and investigate deeper when you got it all wrong. Much like ballet is a visual spectacle, supported and enhanced by music, so you could see your paper: a visual storyboard accompanied by text that serves to provide context, and discuss meaning.

None of the above five tips are never-heard-before epiphanies. Most scientists live by at least one or two of them, but few consistently embrace all. Perhaps it’s the nature of the beast. Academia is a fiercely competitive environment. Pressure to publish may drive us to go for projects that seem quick wins and low hanging fruit. That same publication pressure may lead us to favour novel methods over standard ones. When you feel like you’re in a career-long competition with each other, it’s not obvious to collaborate, share code, ask for help and encourage others to find mistakes in your work. Presenting results in a few tables or two-dimensional plots takes less time than crafting a storyboard of nuanced yet intelligible figures. And our innate tendency to seek novelty and perfection may stifle the efficiency and quality of our publication output. However, if we dare to take a few steps back and aim to master all five of these ideas, we’re on a path to success. In this context, defined as conducting great science without sacrificing our mental and social health.

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