1. Writing an Article for Publication
“A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made it” Albert Einstein

2. Why Write?
List three reasons why you want to write an article.

3. Why Read
List three reasons why you read published articles

4. Science Works Through Publication
The way we do science has developed over the last 300 years
Publication in widely-available form is a crucial element
New scientific ideas can be openly discussed, criticised, tested, accepted or rejected
Until you publish, you are not doing science?

5. What Happens to Your Article?
Submitted to Editor
Editor’s “assessment” (reject; revise)
Sent to Reviewers
Reviewers reply to Editor
Editor’s decision (accept; reject; revise)
Back to you: revised version and letter
Editor may revert to Reviewers
Note: It’s always the Editor who decides

6. What Do I Look For as an Editor?
What do you think is the most important feature of an article?

7. What does an editor look for?
Originality
What’s new?
Content
Is there enough?
Simplicity
Can it be clearer, shorter?

8. A Perfect Article
Brings together the two key scientific elements of THEORY and EXPERIMENT
Shows how a variety of disparate data/results/observations can be understood through a single, elegant hypothesis.

9. It’s Your Work There’s no fixed formula for writing a paper
You need to develop your own style
But…there are some useful guidelines…
(…once you know them, you can decide when to break them…)

10. Elements of an Article Abstract (Summary) Keywords Introduction
Methods (Experimental Details)
Results
Discussion
Conclusions
Acknowledgements

11. What’s wrong with this abstract?
“In this paper, we will describe some experiments that were conducted to measure the creep strain rate in a stainless steel, and we will discuss the significance of the results.”

12. This one is better, but could still be improved – how?
“We conducted a series of experiments to measure the creep strain rate in the stainless steel alloy SUS678F. We showed that the creep strain rate is proportional to the applied stress.”

13. “Creep strain rate is an important measure of a material’s high-temperature performance. Creep has been measured in various materials but not in the stainless steel alloy SUS678F. We conducted a series of experiments which showed that the creep strain rate is proportional to the applied stress in this alloy. This strongly suggests that the mechanism of creep in this material is grain boundary diffusion.”

14. The Objectives The end of the Intro is a good place to state:
Objectives, or
Hypothesis, or
Research Question

15. Discussion Most often done badly Most feared by young researchers
Say what’s good about your work
Say what’s bad (limitations)
Compare to other published work
Speculate
Criticise other work

16. Style Do you say… “We did this…” or “This was done…” or
“The present authors did this…”

17. Feedback How to handle rejection!
Increasing rejection rates, editorial policy
Revising your article: responding to reviewers’ comments
Point by point
Explain what you changed
OR explain why you didn’t

18. Some Other Points for Discussion
How do you choose which journal to submit to?
Impact factors
Reviewers
Readership
Turnaround time

19. Some Other Points for Discussion
“Open Access” journals versus traditional journals
Here’s what Bentham Open publishers say…
WHY PUBLISH IN OPEN ACCESS JOURNALS?  
Your article will obtain more citations.
You own the copyright to your article.
Your article may be peer-reviewed and published very fast.
All interested readers can read, download, and/or print open access articles at no cost
Your article can be read by potentially millions of readers, which is incomparable to publishing in a traditional subscription journal.
Open Access journals are FREE to view!
Elsevier’s monopoly