Career Articles

Social media has been under scrutiny over the past few years and for good reason. It is a powerful platform to relay information, or in some cases, misinformation, to the masses around the world, instantly. For this reason we thought it was an important and timely topic to discuss.

Individuals who have chosen science as a career understand the scientific process, the need for research, the potential that comes from gaining an understanding of how things work, and the very long time span needed to realize that potential. But what about people who aren’t scientists? And politicians who want to see the returns on their investments in science? How does the scientific community help others understand?

The first part of this series covered writing a first draft of a manuscript, and the second part covered the honing and polishing needed to bring the manuscript to the point where it is ready to submit to a journal.  The topic of this final article is navigating the process of submitting, revising, and getting your manuscript accepted for publication.

Part 1 of this series covered the task of transforming data in your lab notebook and thoughts in your head into a first full draft of your manuscript.  The next task is to convert this rough draft into a polished manuscript that you can publish and be proud of.  This process requires streamlining your message, honing your logic, and achieving clarity and conciseness in your prose.  You will likely work through a number of drafts, and revising will probably take significantly longer than writing your first draft, but this effort is essential to create a publication-quality manuscript.  Here I detail the key steps of this process.

This is the first part of a three-part series on How to Write a Biophysics Article.  Although the suggestions herein are geared toward a Biophysical Journal paper and are targeted for graduate students and postdocs, they apply generally to all scientific writing and all levels of scientists and engineers.  In this first paper, I will discuss the hardest part of writing a manuscript — writing the first full draft.  The important tasks of polishing your writing and figures to achieve publication quality will be tackled in the second paper, and the third paper will cover navigating peer review and getting your manuscript published.