I will admit that writing a research paper is not as easy as I thought. We might have the greatest ideas but if we don’t know how to present it, these ideas might never come to life. Writing in science is an important skill that takes effort, time and experience. What helped me a lot was an online course “Writing in Sciences” that I took from Stanford University (check out the link below for credentials). Most importantly, I can now put into practice this skill with the Mental Effort research and experiment we are conducting.
In the writing process, 70% of the time takes the prewriting: collection of information, brainstorming, outline development; 10% the first draft and 20% revision(Sainani) I used to put 5% in revision, but once I learned its importance, I started practicing and it made my process easier. Once we have run the experiment and we have the results, the first thing to write down are methods, tables and figures. Tables and figures are what editors, reviewers or readers look at first, therefore we should built them in a way that best tells our story, the main points, with no need to read back in the text. Biostatistics is a necessary course to take so you can understand the types of graphs, how to read and understand the statistical meaning and the p value. Above is an example of EDA (exploratory data analysis) I built in R programming.
When writing the methods and material, we should give enough information to replicate the study. When it comes to Introduction and discussion, Kristin Sainani PhD -in the course of writing in sciences- she compared it with a cone: “The introduction starts from general to narrow, versus in discussion starts with the most narrow piece of information and ends with the big picture: why your study matters”.
Always pay attention to the verb tense when writing your research paper. Use active voice. Use present or past tense accordingly and pay attention to punctuation. By becoming a good science writer, it will be easier to spot pseudoscience or predatory journals.
Here is my credential link https://www.coursera.org/account/accomplishments/verify/NVZ2UVUAZT7H?utm_campaign=social_icons&utm_content=cert_image&utm_medium=certificate&utm_product=course&utm_source=link&utm_user=a2e3bad4d26ef02e75bda845c742a20348fbd771