Structure of a peer-review paper Part 2

12/05/24 • 19 min

In this episode of Wildlife By The Numbers, Grant and Matt continue their discussion on writing a scientific paper. They share with us writing the paper backwards by starting with the results, what to avoid in the discussion section, the abstract, title, and realistic number of drafts. Is 15 or 20 drafts a realistic number of drafts? Listen in and discover the answer.

Quotes from this episode:

"One of the things I see often happen in the discussion is people want to talk about things that are way outside the bounds of a particular study. So the study was designed to answer some specific question, and there's this desire usually to make the study answer questions that are kind of beyond that frame of inference."

"...he'll take a piece of the paper out and put in a new document. And that was just a huge help for me because I do get distracted by just the text on the paper and just the volume of text on the paper. So sometimes if I need to focus in on a paragraph or a section, I'll just cut that out and make a new document, and then just put it back in when I feel like I got it right."

In a future episode, they will cover choosing where to submit the paper and how to handle the review process.

Episode music: Shapeshifter by Mr Smith is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/

Quotes from this episode:

In a future episode, they will cover choosing where to submit the paper and how to handle the review process.

Episode music: Shapeshifter by Mr Smith is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/

Previous Episode

Structure of a peer-review paper Part 1

In this episode of Wildlife By The Numbers, Matt and Grant, a duo who has been co-authoring papers together for over a decade, give a candid discussion on publication to share your work. They have a lively discussion of how they write a scientific paper, and dive into the Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion sections of a paper sharing how their writing was influenced by their professors as well. They have saved the abstract, editing, proofing, and deciding which journal to submit to for another episode.

Quotes from this episode...

"Writing is the backbone of what scientists do, and it's extremely important to write up what you're doing and present that in a format that has been reviewed by other scientists. At the most basic level, folks can understand that you wanna share your knowledge. But there's a number of reasons why you want to write a scientific paper, have that go through a a rigorous peer review, and then publish it. One of them is, as I just said, you wanna share the information so others can learn from it and others can build off it and improve and contribute to the field of wildlife biology or ecology or whatever science your your discipline you're working with and advance that field, help folks understand the issue that you're working on because it may it may spur other questions that they have or help them with the work that they're doing. Scientific writing also in that peer review process also brings credibility to your work."

"Why in the world do we use such a format? Why is it not like if I do a presentation at a scientific meeting, I may do some methods and results to discuss that, and then start over again. And do that multiple times even for one smaller type that might be a chapter in a thesis or dissertation. I'm not gonna roll all my results together and talk through all those individual results and then discuss all of them afterwards, it just doesn't flow very well. So why in the world do we do it that way?"

"What Stuart has impressed upon me is in your introduction, you have the first three hundred words is what's gonna grab your reader. And in that first three hundred words, you should speak to what the issue is that you're addressing, why it's important, why it matters, and then how you resolve it. So the first three hundred words, what's the issue? Why does it matter? And then how do you address it? And that's how he taught me to write it."

Episode music: Shapeshifter by Mr Smith is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/

Next Episode

Peer-review publication Part 3

Matt, Grant, and Randy finish up the discussion on peer-review publication highlighting their process for selecting journals, getting the submission ready, the review and handling rejections. Randy describes the process as both an author and an associate editor.

From this episode:

"Randy, what happens after an author submits a paper? How how does that work from a journal standpoint?"

"Well, it goes through their process, and then the editor or the chief editor distributes it down to the editor in charge of the paper, which then contacts and associates that paper, with the appropriate associate editor. And then at that time, the associate editor is responsible for creating a review team comprised of typically two to three reviewers."