These are pieces written to desribe what it is like working in science.
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I was asked recently to give some advice on preparing papers, which forced me to try and summarize how to go about it. It's always a shock for a student when they finally come to write their first paper. Usually, they have worked so hard planning their experiments, and doing their experiments and understanding their results, that it seems the rest should be easy: It never is.
One saving grace is that no-one expects great literature. Scientific prose has a deserved reputation for its leaden style and grammatical passivity. So that bar is not set very high. But good scientific writing must achieve clarity. The student writing a multi-author work may find themselves in the middle of a group of competing egos, each wanting control of the paper's message, but with no agreement on what that message might be. Giving the paper a strong structure will help to resolve these conflicts.
This structure serves the paper by pulling readers through the data in a way that makes it comprehensible and conveys its novelty and interest. Often it isn't describing the same path that the experiments took, because this was an iterative process of experiment and continuing refinement, not the linear march from point to point which is much easier for a reader to understand. The structure of the paper is in the data, figures and tables, that act as stepping stones for the journey you want the reader to make. The emphasis of this presentation needs to fall on the points that seem most important to the authors. It needs to be able to articulate the argument. It should highlight what the authors' are certain of: Many novices are so anxious about the questions that they have not answered, that they do not spend enough time explaining the work that they have done. When you've lived with a novel piece of information even for a few months, it is easy to forget that it's still an exciting unknown for the rest of the world.
When you have a clear plan for the order of the data, then you can start on the detail of the writing. This will follow the order laid down by the journal to which you plan to send your work and is usually something like this. First, an introduction summarizes the point for which the paper starts, and puts it in the context of the work of others. Then comes a clear exposition of the results, with paragraphs linking the data together and emphasising the logic that leads from one figure to the next. And finally a discussion, which although often somewhat repetitive of the results, can be thoughtful and is the appropriate moment to make any more speculative points that you think are important. Methods and figure legends benefit from clarity and brevity. They are often a source of criticism and irritation for those trying to apply the same techniques in their own work, on the other hand, a lugubrious legend attached to a difficult figure can sink a paper in the eyes of an impatient reviewer.
Returning to the problem of multiple authors, my view is that the overall structure of the paper belongs to the first author and the senior author. Other voices may contribute a lot to the detail of the writing, where attention to producing clear and easily understood prose is almost always going to be a help, but a paper may only be remembered for one point. So always try and be clear about what this one point should be.
The first time you 'finish' a draft of a paper, you will be shocked by how unfinished it is. Expect to go through several rounds of revision and you will not be disappointed. And even when you have beaten your way through the electronic submission process, struggled with validating your figures and received confirmation that the editor has your paper in hand, you have only just begun. Because the reviewers that read your paper will not worry for a moment about your feelings. They will simply be looking for great science.
Lindsay Nicholson.