Template Workflow to Draft a Research Paper in One Day (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Hey, Professor Stuckler here. In this video, I am going to show you how to write a full research paper in one day. Now, I know some of you are thinking, yeah right, you can't possibly write a full paper in one day, but this actually just happened to me. So, I spend a lot of my time split between Milan and Texas and somehow amidst my travels, I missed the internal memo that there was a journal submission due to a special issue in 24 hours. So, I had to scramble. Now, I've published over 300 papers in peer-reviewed international journals, so I know how to move fast when need be. But what I learned is there's actually a hidden formula, a hidden template that you can literally copy and paste into your writing that can make this possible. So, you don't have to be an elite professor like myself who's been a professor at Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge. You just need the right workflow and the right structure and the formula I'm going to share with you. And at the end of the video, I'm going to reveal that downloadable template that you can use today to write your paper in as little as a day. So, let's get started and I'm going to show you this AI enhanced workflow step-by-step in this video. So, the first step, you need to get everything in place. It's kind of like cooking. The French chef will say mise en place, that you need to have your carrots chopped, your lettuce to the side, your olive oil, your salt and pepper. The last thing you want to do is be scrambling to put all the pieces together and try to make your soup. You want everything prepared so you can focus on the craftsmanship of the paper. So, what does that mean for you? You need your figures, your tables, your analysis, your data already locked, loaded, and ready to deploy into your manuscript. I highly recommend that you have what we sometimes call as a result set. So, it's just a store of your table in figures, tables, boxes, whatever you have already ready and lined up. Quick interruption to today's video from our sponsor, Mate. If you want to work with a real person and not AI, I would encourage you to check out our elite mentorship and support programs where we work directly together in a one-to-one capacity to help you develop a personalized plan that's going to get you from where you are to defining a winning topic all the way through to successful publication. We go so far as to offer a publication guarantee that if you show up, you do the work, we don't do it for you, that would be unethical just like AI doing it for you is unethical and just not a good idea. We work together each step of the way so you never feel lost, you never feel stuck, so that you optimize your chances for success and we guarantee we're not going to leave you hanging if you show up and do the work. We are going to see you through to the finish line. That's a big ask, that's a big offer and no one we know of can match this level of commitment with the real results that our students have had. If you're interested, book a call with the link below and see if you could be a good fit for us working together in an intimate way. Step two, use our inside-out method. So one of the most common mistakes that I see researchers do is write the paper from the beginning, going introduction, methods, results, conclusion. We use the opposite method, the inside-out method, which is a recipe for avoiding being stuck. So start with the methods. That's the easiest section to write because all you have to do is write about what you did in a clear, linear, and simple way and so you know intimately what you did. This will help avoid that initial writer's block that I see many researchers have so that you start getting the car in gear, you start rolling, and you start moving. We have a whole dedicated video on how to write the method section, but just as a quick example, if you're doing a quant paper to keep it linear, you might want to start with how did you collect your data? How did you then clean up and code your data? How did you then analyze it? And what robustness, specification, or other checks did you do on it? And by keeping it simple, that linear flow, it's also going to make it not just easier for you to write, it's also going to make it a whole lot easier for your reviewers and your readers down the road. Step three, write your result section. This should be relatively straightforward to do because you've already followed step one and you have your data, figures, and tables already laid out. The result section needs a structure and typically at this point you want clarity on what your big three to five main points, main highlights, are going to be of your evidence. You don't want to try to pack in everything because that can really distract from your good stuff. Not every detail is relevant and so you don't want death by irrelevance in your result section. So stay focused on what the big points are and find a structure that enables those to breathe, to emerge. Common structures can be around variables, around hypotheses, around geographic regions. There's going to be a natural order. It's hard for me to say exactly what that's going to be for your paper, but one example from a recent paper I did is we had a series of different outcomes looking at the benefits of parental leave for children and so we had a natural order in which we reported our results by mental health and then physical health outcomes. Again, find the structure that best fits your results. This sometimes creates confusion because there's not always one right or wrong answer, but if you've done step one and if you know what your big three to five points are and you have that clarity before you start writing rather than right to try to figure things out, you're going to have a much smoother ride in writing up your results. Step four, the discussion. A lot of researchers get hung up on this and this is perhaps one of the most formulaic parts of any paper. It's down to a science because it really is. So the first part of your discussion should simply be a recap of what your paper found. Just very shortly, those three to five points that were emerging from your results, just itemize and list them here. In your first pass, if you just want to go first, second, third, that's okay too. You can clean that up later with the editing. Just get it down for now. Next, go straight into your limitations. We recommend proceeding with limitations for multiple reasons. Firstly, your limitations are going to be somewhere in your discussion. We like to put it right after those main points because your reviewers are hung up on, well, there's this weakness you didn't address and they're not psychologically open to really interpreting your findings more deeply until you've gotten those limitations out of the way. By the way, we have a whole dedicated training on writing up the discussion. Really encourage you to check this out on any of these sections. If you want to go deeper, check out our how to write a paper step-by-step full playlist. So once you've got your limitations, again, this is not a time to be shy about your limitations, but be bold. This is an opportunity to not just say, oh my paper's so weak, this is so embarrassing, and cover your head in shame, but this is an opportunity to make field level recommendations. So if you only had cross-sectional data, don't put yourself down and say, oh we only had cross-sectional data. Say future research will be needed to collect longitudinal data or data with better follow-up of people over time. Turn your limitations into strengths and make sure you include them here because the worst thing you want is someone to say, ah, but this, you know, well, Professor Stuckler, you didn't think about this or that. The limitations is your place to park those and almost like a bull charging out to you, hold up that red flag and let the bull just charge right on past deflecting them, diverting them to where you want the conversation to go. After the limitations, you sometimes optionally might remind reviewers of your strengths. You'll see what's going on here. Main findings, we've kind of dipped down to limitations. Now we're going to have this narrative arc building to a crescendo. You'll see this as the discussion progresses. Next, strengths. So often we'll start with notwithstanding these limitations, this paper has several strengths. This is a great point to remind reviewers of the value add of your paper. What was so strong? What was so important? What did you contribute to the field? And this is going to come back and link to the introduction as I'm going to discuss in a minute. So strengths. Another thing that you might follow up with, this is optional, is coherence. How does your research extend existing studies? Does it agree? Does it disagree? Helps you situate your contribution in light of existing literature. This is again optional, but I find this often very helpful. Finally, you'll get to two components of the discussion section that are usually critical. One is directions for future research. So typically, your research, you've just completed this project, but there are things you haven't done yet in the ongoing conversation in science that you're having. This is your point to almost roll out the red carpet for what you want to do next, to map out a research agenda. And again, this can hark back to some of the limitations you highlighted earlier. And finally, the big payoff section. What does all this mean? The point to put meaning into your research. This last paragraph, or maybe two, is about what are the implications for theory, for policy, for practice. This is your time to really deepen that interpretation and make concrete recommendations. Listen, for this section, perfect is the enemy of the good. For your limitations, I recommend just starting with a clear itemization. Okay, limitation one was cross-sectional. Limitation two was maybe there was some missing data. Whatever those were, you might even just want to put bullet point them down and then put meat on the bones of that outline. But definitely, if you follow this template, you're not going to get lost and you're going to ensure that you have all the critical ingredients of the discussion section. And again, check out the video where I go through existing discussion sections in hard science and social science and I show that they're one in the same in the crucial ingredients that they have. And if you follow this template, you're going to have ticked all those boxes in your own. Step five, the introduction. Yes, we saved this for last. And it's almost because your introduction is like the bow on the top of the package. And you can't really put that bow there until you put the material inside the package already, which is the meat of your paper, the methods, the results, and the conclusion. So the goal of your introduction is really to justify the need for your paper and explain why it's so valuable and why it's so important. We use a three-part structure and really this can boil down to three main paragraphs as follows. So the first paragraph, you need to get into why is this conversation important now? Why is there a big debate in your field? Why should somebody stop what they're doing and pay attention to your paper? This is really critical. I see so many papers start off with kind of a rookie mistake saying, this paper aims to do the following. And they've sort of jumped ahead in structure. It's almost like telling a joke about, you know, a guy and a girl walked into a bar, except you didn't start there. You started in the middle of the joke, almost there sitting at the bar, and the guy turns to the girl and says something or other. But you need to start at the beginning. So start at why are we having this conversation now? Why is this so important for your field? That's a really important signal to your readers and to editors of journals that helps them to judge if they're going to send your paper out for review, if this is relevant, if it's a good fit for the journal, which not a good fit is the leading reason for papers being rejected. So that's really going to be your first paragraph. You might need to, after that, quickly define any terms. So if you're using a term in a specific way, for example, just had a researcher we worked with do a paper on compassion-based interventions, and she needed to define very quickly what she meant by that, what the field meant by that. Or a paper on resilience, similarly, needed to very quickly get that out of the way. So it was a common playing field. People from many disciplines were working on the same definitions going forward. Again, that's usually just a sentence or two max. Okay, so we've gotten why we're having this conversation now. Next, you want to very quickly get to what's already known and what's not known on the topic. This is helping you to drive your gap. And that gap is really critical for your paper because basically what you want to say in your paper is like, hey, the research has come to here. This is where the field has brought us. And what's missing is here. And that's where I'm going to take us to. That space there, that's going to be your value add. And often that directly corresponds to the gap. I mean, it can happen that your gap is out here in the value add. In this paper, I only got to here. That's okay too. But in most papers, typically you're going to define that missingness in the field at the end of the section, that what is not known and needs to be known. And that's going to set the stage for your study. So that middle part of the introduction, you need to actually get deep in some of the evidence that's out there. What is known already on the topic? And that typically will follow a formula. Maybe author X did this and found that. A formula of describing the existing evidence is, again, what did they do? And you might need to say very quickly what their methods were. What did they show? What they found? What that means for the big research question. So you get through what's known on the topic. And then you need to get through what's not known. And this is where your critique comes in. So you need to say, well, but this was limited maybe. Again, with the earlier example, they only use cross-sectional data. Maybe they had too much missing data. Whatever the problem is, you want to highlight that, but in a delicate way. Because remember, they might be your reviewers. So you don't want to call them out too harshly. So make it more of a field problem that you're trying to solve than an individual problem, if that makes sense. For introduction tactics, again, check out this video as part of the playlist. It gets into advanced tactics as well. That's going to help you get the right reviewers for your paper. So when you get to those critiques, that flows naturally into the third part, and often the third paragraph of your introduction, which is now you've rolled out the red carpet. What your study is going to do. So often it will have the flow up here. To plug this gap, our study does, and very succinctly, what your study is going to do. So you can see a natural flow. Well, past papers were only cross-sectional. To plug this gap, our paper is now using a longitudinal method, or it could be a type of population gap. Oh, so past papers looked in the US. We're going to look in India for the first time. Different gaps have different values and different strengths. Just make sure that the biggest value out of your paper is communicated clearly in the introduction here. A general tip here, I alluded to this a moment ago, don't be a perfectionist. Perfect is the enemy of the good. Well, look, you have one day, so it's not going to be perfect. Just accept that. And sometimes I find it really advantageous to write under this kind of pressure. It is a forcing function to prevent you from being a perfectionist. So even if you're just vomiting on the page at this point, even if it's just excrement, that's okay. You can clean it up later. Just try to vomit in a controlled way, in the sense of following our templates and an outline. So vomit your limitations here. That's okay. But just try to aim for the right place. That might not be the best analogy. You get the idea. Now, hang on, wait a second. You may be like, well, Professor Stuckler, you promised us an AI enhanced flow. You haven't used AI at all. Yeah, that's right. You shouldn't really be needing to use AI at all because this is following a template. This is almost cookie cutter and all scientific papers follow the same hidden template. And once you realize that, you will have the superpower, like me, of being able to write papers almost in your sleep. And certainly one day really does become possible. That's not to say that you shouldn't use AI. In fact, I want to recommend to you as the final step here, the holy trinity of technology to use in your papers. So the first of these in our AI enhanced workflow is any LLM. I personally use ChatGBT, but really most of them are really quite similar in their performance criteria and will do the same thing. So I've got a prompt that you can copy and paste. And what I want you to do is an AI peer review. And this AI peer review is going to help you not to write the paper, but it's going to prevent you from embarrassing yourself. That's really important. It's going to catch what we call howlers or any rookie mistakes or things that are just not clear. And look, this happens when you put things together in a day, there's going to be some messiness that creeps in. The AI is going to help you stamp that out. So that AI peer review is going to hone in like a laser beam on what some of the main problems are that you can then try to fix. This is a great last pass for your editing to try to either clean up any infelicities that have crept in, or if you can't and you're running out of time, armor up that limitation section. That's the best place to put that. But again, you want to know what you don't know, what you may have overlooked. And that's where this AI peer review step is really going to help. By the way, as a side note, the AI I use is pretty sycophantic. It has never actually said to reject a paper, even when I pushed it to the limits to try to drop in the worst paper possible. So don't take too much stock into the output of this prompt because it's probably going to give you a major revision no matter what. But do take critically the comments that it comes up with. And we actually do this as a step now in our FastTrack research community. We have both a human internal peer review and an AI peer review, and that's because so many reviewers are getting lazy. It's free work and they're using LLMs to do their peer review for them and then humanizing them for it later. They don't have any consequences for doing so. I hope this changes in the future. It can lead to nonsensical comments, but this is a good practice step that we recommend to our researchers, whether they're just beginning or they're more advanced. The second piece of the Holy Trinity is Zotero. If you don't have a reference manager, what are you doing? This is basic and you're going to need this to lock and load your paper for submission to the journal and to get your references right. If you're trying to go one by one putting in your reference and formatting them, you're not going to finish your paper in a day. So it's free, it's simple, it's easy to use. Just follow the link below to find it. Use it immediately and that's going to take care of this tedious part of your references that can take you hours and hours of time wasted if you don't do it. Third part of the Holy Trinity is Grammarly. Again, free, easy to use, it's going to catch any of the grammar mistakes that you have in your paper. The LLM will partly catch this, but Grammarly is just better. There's nothing unethical, anything you have to worry about of any of this part of the workflow, but especially if English is not a native language and even if it is, Grammarly, you've been editing quickly, it's going to catch missing commas, spacing errors, formatting errors, and you don't want those because when you submit a paper in a day like this, it can create rookie mistakes. If an editor sees a spelling error, I've seen as an editor spelling errors in the title, formatting glitches in the first sentence, just gives this cursory, this impression that you did cursory job, that you did half-baked job, and if you couldn't get the details right on that, how detailed and factual and accurate is your actual analysis going to be? So don't make those rookie mistakes. Use the Holy Trinity and it's going to save you a whole lot of time, frustration, and get you better acceptance rates when you ultimately submit your paper. Listen, last but not least, I have our Fast Track Academic Paper Template, which puts in paragraph by paragraph format what you need to do in each section of your paper. For each of these sections, you can head right over to our How to Write a Paper step-by-step playlist. What we've got publicly available is amazing. Of course, inside of our communities, it's even better because we have more opportunities to provide you feedback and work together directly. But trust me, this template is the resource that I wish I would have had when I was sitting where you are. I've had many sleepless nights, long weekends, time lost writing papers that just didn't need to be. So download this. Let me know what you think about it in the comments. Were you able to write your paper in one day like me? Did it take you a weekend? If it's taking you months, we need to have a chat. Click the link below. Get on a call with us. Let's see what we can do for you if we're a good fit to work together. And I look forward to seeing you in the next video. Again, thanks for subscribing and being part of our fast but growing community.