Scientific reading and communication
Reading
Some reading advices I took from here:
- Read widely and a lot within your field too.
- Learn to read efficiently. Focus on the five key paragraphs: abstract, first introduction paragraph, final introduction paragraph, first discussion paragraph, and last discussion paragraph. And of course, the figures. If the paper is well written, you can also read the first sentence of every paragraph (topic sentence) to get the main gist.
General conciseness advices
Communication should be efficient: transmit the important information in the clearest way, i.e. concision. And often conciseness comes through simplicity. Here are some useful quotes about invitation to simplicity:
Clotilde Djuikem: “Elegance means saying a lot with a little, without sacrificing rigour. Seeking simplicity means seeking the essential. It’s not about doing less, it’s about getting it right. The key to vulgarizing with elegance: cut out what distracts. Keep what enlighten.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry : “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”.
Oral presentations
Here are some bulk advices for oral presentations:
- Maximum one slide per minute
- Have clear titles
- Put a message on each slide
- Zoom out on the results, i.e. give general take-home messages
Writing articles
Hotaling (2020) provides some useful advices for writing scientific articles in ten guidelines that I summarized here:
- Take writing seriously: you are a professional writer.
- Identify and stick to your message: what is your paper’s goal? Inevitable text expansion comes with directionless writing. By connecting each part of your paper to a larger, overarching message, you will build one of the world’s most powerful communication tools: narrative.
- Get to the point: transfer information as efficiently as possible.
- Keep your Methods and Results contained: moving anything better suited to the Methods or Results to those sections.
- Do not repeat yourself (too often). It is unnecessary to repeat content in figures and tables elsewhere in the manuscript.
- Avoid unnecessary or inefficient “lead-ins”: Hotaling (2020), Box 1.
- Use first-person, active voice: active voice is generally tighter describes authors’ actions from their perspective.
- Remove unnecessary words: sentence filler consists of features being overused: (1) qualifiers, (2) prepositional phrases, and (3) transitions. E.g., Hotaling (2020), Box 2.
- Simplify your language: complicated words and clever phrasing take space, waste time, and may cause your message to be misinterpreted. E.g., Hotaling (2020), Box 3.
- Seek and embrace feedback: diagnosing editorial issues in your own writing is difficult.
Publishing
Advices from here:
- Publish quality work: Fewer excellent things are better than lots of average things.
- Published is better than perfect: If it’s not published, it essentially doesn’t exist in the academic world.
- Remember, rejection is the rule. No, you’re not being rejected more often than others. We all get rejected on a daily basis. I’ve had papers bounce through five journals before being published. Unfortunately, it’s the nature of science. It’s how it works. Don’t take it personally. The people with the most papers in the big journals are probably the who have received the most rejections.