Speaker 1: If you're struggling with how to write your research articles for publication, this video is going to be exactly what you need. In this video, I'm going to dive into the four steps to writing your articles for publication in journals. I'm Dr. Alana Reister, and I have my PhD in chemistry. On this channel, I create content to help you complete your research with more confidence and less effort. In this video, I want to touch on the four major steps to writing your research articles for publication in journals. Before we get started, I want to let you know that you can follow along this process. If you download my scientific research paper checklist, the link is available in the description below. The first step to writing a great research article to get published is to create your story. A lot of people want to start off with writing maybe their introduction or their method section first without really knowing what their story is in their paper. But instead, if you draft up your story where you have clear conclusions and you know exactly what you're trying to tell, how that research developed through time or through different experiments that you performed, actually writing your paper is going to be so much easier than if you're simply just trying to write up all this data where you don't really know what the story is. I generally create my stories through figure outlines, where I'll show different results and I'll be able to lay out all of these different figures of my results and then be able to talk through exactly what I'm doing just based off the figures alone. If you go through this exercise, it's going to make it a lot easier for you to actually write a compelling research article. The second step in writing your research article is to figure out what journal you're submitting it to and what are the formatting guidelines for that journal. You maybe want to look up where similar papers have been submitted to or talk with people and figure out where they think your paper best fits with. This is why having that story up front makes it a lot easier as you're moving through because you already know the story, so it's a lot easier to figure out where that story belongs. Once you figure out what journal you're going to submit it to, you want to look at their formatting guidelines. You want to figure out what's their citation style. Do they have different section headers that they request? For example, if you're in my field of analytical chemistry, a lot of analytical chemistry journals request that you write your results and discussion sections as a single section. However, I also did a postdoc in biology. In biology, most journals in that field want your results section and your discussion section as separate sections. This is why knowing the journal and looking at their formatting guidelines before you get started writing is really important because if you wrote all your results and discussion as a single section and then you're going to submit it to a journal that requires it as separate sections, that's just a lot of extra work for you to split up those sections. And even the way you go about writing those sections is fairly different depending on what the journal requires. Also look up regulations on figures so that you can go ahead and have those pre-made up and on length of your paper. If a journal requires your paper to be under 8,000 words and you go off and write a paper that's now 16,000 words, again, you've now put in a lot of extra time both in writing it and having to cut that back. So knowing all of those formatting guidelines ahead of time is actually going to end up making you more successful in the long run whenever you actually start writing your research article. The third step is to actually write your research article. This is where we think the bulk of our time should be, but actually the first two steps are really important and making sure that whenever you sit down to write your research article, you can do it in a matter of hours instead of spending months trying to figure it out because you don't know what story you're telling and you don't know what you're doing. When you're writing your research article, you should follow the sections that were outlined by the journal and how they prefer for it to be formatted. I do want to touch on two key points though whenever you're writing a research article that generally makes it a lot harder for people to write. The first point is that whenever you're writing your introduction, you want to write it so that you're leading your reader to the results. The entire part of your introduction should be taking your reader from saying they don't really know anything about your field. You should give them the reasons why they should read your paper, the background information to allow them to understand your results and the context for your study within your introduction. Every sentence in your introduction should have a purpose that specifically helps the reader further understand the research being performed or the importance of that research. A lot of times in our introductions, we want to basically write a review of everything we know that usually ends up in having a really bad introduction and potentially increases your chance of getting rejections from journals. So making sure that everything in your introduction is based in your reader and not in yourself is really important for having a higher chance of your paper getting accepted. The second major point I want to talk on with writing your research paper is that your results and discussion sections should be illustrating that story that you created in step one. Honestly, if you've been able to sit out your figures and walk through the story, writing your results and discussion sections should be super easy because it should be just basically typing out what you talked through, maybe including a few more examples and things like that within the results side of it. But basically you're just telling a story and then you're saying, okay, how does this story relate within the context of the literature that's been performed previously? That should be the same literature that you're talking about in your introduction. Again, this is why having that story before you ever start writing is so important because that story should guide everything within your research paper, including your introduction, your results, and your discussion section. By creating that story, your results section and discussion section should essentially write themselves. It should be really simple for you to go through basically having a section per figure in your outline and then be able to write out your results and discussion section. The fourth step to writing a research article for publication is to prepare and submit your research article. In the preparation stage, you want to go through editing your article, ensuring correct format and preparing all the extra documents that you need to submit. In most cases to submit a research article, you want to have a cover letter for it. You also will generally want to have your figures as separate files. You want your manuscript, your supplemental, and depending on your journal, you might need to have a highlights file or a conflict of interest file. You want to have all of these documents prepared prior to going in and trying to submit your paper. Also when preparing your paper, you want to double check all of your citations. Make sure that nothing was left blank and if you're using a citation manager, that everything got formatted properly within the document itself. Going through and making these preparations is actually going to increase your chances of getting your paper accepted and minimizing the number of revisions that you may need to do once you've submitted your paper. If you want to get these action steps and more to help you walk through step by step exactly how to write and submit your research articles for publication, get my scientific research paper checklist. The link is in the description below. It's a free download that you can get that basically allows you to walk through what you need to do to prepare your research article and then what you need to include in each section of your research article. And then finally finishing out with how to prepare and submit your research article. I really hope this was helpful and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.