Speaker 1: There are two really important things to consider.

Speaker 2: Style and structure.

Speaker 1: We'll take structure first.

Speaker 2: So this is a paper I wrote last year, just to kind of show you the format of it. So this was monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Speaker 3: So you kind of give your title of the paper. The title is like the headline for your article. It's the first thing that people will see, so you want to grab their attention but you also want to tell them what they're going to find in the paper.

Speaker 2: So then you list the people you've worked with, so that's me, P Hatfield, and then these are colleagues that I've worked with on this project. Here's the abstract.

Speaker 3: This really is a short paragraph that will help you sell your paper to a potential reader.

Speaker 2: So someone doesn't have to read the whole paper if they want to get the gist of what's going on.

Speaker 1: Every paper needs to include an introduction. This should be a short overview of what your study's about and what you've found.

Speaker 2: And basically, why should someone be interested in this?

Speaker 1: You should then move on to what we call a literature review, which is essentially talking about other studies that people have done trying to find the same thing or something similar and really what sparked the idea for your piece of work.

Speaker 3: After the introduction, you want to go on to the methodology. So this really explains how you went about doing your experiments. This is the equipment you used and the way you set it up. And you really want to be as specific as you can here because it's really important that anybody who would want to do the experiment again should be able to reproduce the experiment and get the same results. So that goes on for a little bit.

Speaker 2: And then you kind of get to the kind of main part of the data, some nice graphs. That kind of is your main results. What did I find out? What did I discover?

Speaker 1: Did anything go wrong? Did you learn something that you weren't expecting? Or was everything that you assumed proved right?

Speaker 3: This is where you will put most of your tables or your graphs representing the most interesting parts of your data. Don't worry about putting everything here, but just enough to tell the story and to represent exactly what you found.

Speaker 2: Then I've got a section where I kind of compare it to other people who kind of got similar data sets but a bit different and I say, well, do I find something that's similar to them or do I find something that's a bit different? What does that kind of mean?

Speaker 3: What you want to do is provide a discussion. So this is where you discuss the implications or bring in some of the context from the introduction and analyse your results.

Speaker 1: The end of the paper should be a conclusion, which will really talk about the novelty and significance of your work. It will sum up the paper in one fell swoop and show the reader exactly why you've done the study, what you learned and what might change as a result of the work that you've done.

Speaker 3: And also use it to point to any work that can be done in the future or work that you might be doing as a result of following up from this study.

Speaker 2: And then finally, you have to finish with a long list of references of all the other papers you've cited. So I might say, oh, I used this method by so-and-so, I have to kind of list so that someone else reading my paper can then look up this paper and see exactly how that method worked.

Speaker 3: So make sure when you're planning an experiment or doing an experiment to write down everything you read that was useful.

Speaker 1: Just think, one day somebody might reference your paper.

Speaker 3: So next you want to think about style.

Speaker 1: The most important thing is to keep the whole paper clear and concise.

Speaker 3: Don't speculate or exaggerate, keep to the facts.

Speaker 1: Make sure the paper reads with one voice. This is really important, especially if you're working in a group and you're each writing a different section. Someone needs to take the role to oversee the whole piece and make sure it flows smoothly and you can't tell who's written which section.

Speaker 3: It's important to use your own words. Don't just copy and paste from something, even if the explanation is really good.

Speaker 1: Don't overlook grammar and punctuation. It might sound boring, but these are really important and you don't want a reader to be distracted by silly mistakes that you've made.

Speaker 3: You won't want to use too much jargon or technical terms, but equally try not to use any slang or words which may date the paper. You want the paper to be read in 50 years as it would be today.

Speaker 1: A good idea is to ask someone from outside of the project to look it over for you. They won't be lost in the detail and they'll be able to tell you whether it really makes sense or not.

Speaker 2: I think my advice would be you need to obviously check that no one's written this before, before you start putting too much time and effort into it. This happens to professional researchers relatively often. You spend lots of time and effort doing some results and writing a paper and you find, oh no, someone did this last year. I think you need to be realistic. The problem with research projects is they never end. This was using one data set and I found one or two results and then I found something else that's a bit interesting, so I'll do that as well, and then you find something else that's a bit interesting as well, and there's a risk that this is never ending. You've got to say, this paper is just going to be this one idea, we're going to do that and that's it.

Speaker 3: So, your paper's now ready, what next?

Speaker 1: Have a look at the journal website and find out exactly how you should submit. Most journals have a web-based submission system which just involves you filling in a form online and then submitting the article as a file.

Speaker 3: So once you've submitted your paper, somebody in the editorial team will have a look at it and make sure it's a good fit for the journal. Next up is peer review and this is where the editorial team will send your paper to two experts who will have a look at the paper and decide whether it's good enough for publication.

Speaker 1: They'll be looking for originality, significance and rigour.

Speaker 3: They'll be looking to see whether this particular study has been done before. They'll be looking at other work and seeing how much of an impact it is likely to make in a field and also whether the work has been done correctly.

Speaker 1: It's very rare that a paper gets accepted first time.

Speaker 3: The peer review process is really designed to be helpful and aims to make a paper as good as it can be before publication.

Speaker 1: Reviewers tend to have really good advice so have a look at what they've said, think about it, rework the article and send it back.

Speaker 3: After peer review the journal will make some final tweaks to the formatting of the paper and then it's ready for publication.

Speaker 1: And sooner or later it will be published in the journal. You'll be able to read it online and send copies to all your friends.