What is a paper for?

1. What is a paper for? When your write scientific papers, your primary reasons for writing are to communicate information and to persuade others of the validity of your findings and conclusions. Karen Kinsley A Student Handbook for Writing in Biology, 3rd Ed. 2009. This sounds really boring. Megan Jones, Nov. 2, 2011

2. What is a paper for? Write a scientific paper when you have something worth saying.

3. What a paper is NOT for: Some scientists seem to believe that the world will be perpetually grateful to them for keeping . . . a public diary of their diligent activity, or endlessly titillated by accounts of their violations of each one of Nature’s infinite number of maidenheads. Science does not advance by the accumulation of facts gathered at random and published with the fatuous justification that they may “shed light” on some as yet nonexistent problem. Committee on Graduate Training in Scientific Writing, 1986. Scientific Writing for Graduate Students

4. How do you know if you have something worth saying? [Publish] when a research question of some importance has been asked and a convincing answer obtained. Committee on Graduate Training in Scientific Writing, 1986. Scientific Writing for Graduate Students

5. How do you know if you have something worth saying? [Publish] when a research question of some importance has been asked and a convincing answer obtained. Committee on Graduate Training in Scientific Writing, 1986. Scientific Writing for Graduate Students The only way to know if a question of some importance has been asked is to know what is important. Having a point of view is necessary to evaluate potential significance and interest of your findings.

6. How do you know if you have something worth saying? [Publish] when a research question of some importance has been asked and a convincing answer obtained. Committee on Graduate Training in Scientific Writing, 1986. Scientific Writing for Graduate Students To know if your answer is convincing, you need to know: The alternative explanations that might be constructed, The standards of evidence in your field The details of your inferential tools (statistics, visualizations, simulations, etc.).

7. Having a point of view. 1. What others know, or think they know. Knowing the literature in your area is essential to your point of view and your standards of evidence. What do others consider the questions of importance to be? What are the accepted answers to previous questions? How do answers come to be accepted in your field? What grabs the attention of your peers? Are there antagonistic ideologies. If so what fundamentally is at their base?

8. Having a point of view. 2. What YOU think As you get to know the literature, you simultaneously must decide for yourself what your opinion of the state of the field is. Do you find the accepted to be convincing? Are the popular questions answerable with available methods? Are there new ways of formulating interesting questions? Do you want to be in one camp or another, or neither?

9. Positioning yourself in your field Wouldn’t this be great! unknown You ‘known’ Interesting! You’ll get publishable results. Dull. indisputable I am crazy or brilliant. Over here is really more interesting. Hey come back here! You can take each of these approaches at some point in your career.

10. Paper writing is story-telling Induction: Supporting generalizations based on specific instances. Bacon. Deduction: Reasoning from general premises back to specific predictions. Popper. Many scientists believe that most science is hypothetico-deductive: One proposes a hypothesis that incorporates what is interesting, then makes predictions from that hypothesis. Predictions are then tested and the hypothesis rejected if the predictions are not borne out. Phenomenon that bear on your hypothesis are interesting. Induction is out of fashion.

11. Real science A more realistic view of science is of competing world views that lead to research programs that seem productive to their practitioners. The chief sign of this is that Popperian rejections of critical hypotheses are very rare indeed in science. Example: evidence of faster than light neutrinos is dismissed as technical error, or by small alterations in the theory of relativity, not by rejecting relativity. Real progress seems to come from both inductive and deductive processes. Data gathered on hypothesis A, may form the inductive soil for a new hypothesis B. This view of science is found in work of Lakatos and Feyerabend, for example.

12. Hypotheses provide the plot line for scientific story-telling Even if hypotheses are not the only way to drive science forward, hypotheses are great devices for scientific story-telling. E. g.: We can at last confirm our cherished beliefs. Everyone thinks A, but it is not true! Here is a completely new way to explain a phenomenon we observe all the time. Here are all the reasonable hypotheses, and evidence favors A and B, but not C.

13. Advice from a story-teller (Stephen King) on telling stories King, S. 1999. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Scribner, New York. King does not plan his plots, but ‘excavates’ them like fossils. Scientists do not know what the results will be before starting to investigate. They uncover a part of truth by chipping away at the messy dirt of reality. When you think you see the dinosaur, follow it until you have uncovered something, then write it up. You don’t know what you have to say until you find it.

14. Advice from a story-teller (Stephen King) on telling stories One of King’s maxims is tell the story, but ‘leave out the boring parts.’ Too often scientists leave in lots of boring parts that are not necessary. Examples: thoughts on ancillary ideas, too much literature review, tangential discussion points. Many necessary boring parts can now be interred in the supplementary materials.

15. Advice from a story-teller (Stephen King) on telling stories King imagines an ‘ideal reader’ who is going to be surprised, frightened, moved by his story. If the ideal reader in his head is in fact surprised and not say dismayed by an event, he knows it is good for the story. If the ideal reader is not convinced, he knows he has work to do. I too have an ideal reader in my head. Another way to say this is that I try to step back from my writing and read it as another scientist might. If I cannot convince this ideal reader, I know I have work to do.

16. Advice from a story-teller (Stephen King) on telling stories King shows his work to others when he is mostly finished, and pays close attention to what they say. However, he is also skeptical of the real readers, and takes what they say with a grain of salt. Scientists should get many people to read their work before trying to publish. For the novice writer, get input all along the way from anyone you can convince to read things. For more experienced writers, show good drafts around to judge the overall impact. Being brave enough to get and then understand criticism is key to good writing. However, be skeptical of real readers too. Sometimes it may be better to prefer your ideal reader to your real readers.

17. Advice from a story-teller (Stephen King) on telling stories King believes that he needs to have a ‘back story’ for each of his characters that he may not make explicit to the reader, but is necessary for him to make his characters convincing to the reader. For the scientist, the ‘back story’ is the literature that defines what is known and unknown or in doubt. You must know this to be convincing. If you start with a different back story from your reader, your explanations will not look like sense. Start from where your reader might start.

18. Advice from a writer (Steven Pressfield) on actually DOING the writing For many, one of the biggest challenge in writing science is sitting down and actually doing it. This is a common problem in all creative endeavors. This is a wonderful short book on fight and winning that war against your own resistance to do the work: Pressfield, S. 2002. The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle. Rugged Land, New York.

19. Courage Two problems for paper writers are claiming too much for their work, and claiming too little. In my experience, students worry about claiming too much, and therefore seeming arrogant or overstepping their data far more than about being timid and therefore dull and uninteresting. Too often, if the student’s results are not as expected, most discussion is spent on the problems that might have caused anomalous results, not on defending the actual results. Be brave and stick your neck out!

20. Be brave – but not foolish If you find the unusual or the exceptional result, be brave. The first brave thing to do is spend the time to be sure that what you found is well-supported. Say you do an experiment once, and it turns out strange. If you think that you might have discovered something, do it again, do it a different way, look for alternative explanations. If there is still something unusual THEN BE BRAVE and publish.

21. Science and the reliable storyteller • Key to scientific story-telling is the sense that you are a reliable storyteller that the reader can trust. Without that you will not be taken seriously. So you need to tell a story, but convince your reader that it is a true story. • Important tools for getting it right, and convincing your reader you got it right: • Fair review of the literature that deals with contradictions. • Thorough description of Methods, so that what you did is clear. • Strong inference: dealing with multiple alternative hypotheses, rather than just one or two. Platt, J. R. 1964. Strong inference: certain systematic methods of scientific thinking may produce much more rapid progress than others. Science 146:347-353. • Deal with the shortcomings of your own study. Tell the reader the problems, and why they are not fatal, before she thinks of them herself. • Go out of your way to give credit to others.