<![CDATA[NeuroEdit - NeuroEdit blog]]>

<![CDATA[NeuroEdit - NeuroEdit blog]]>Thu, 20 Nov 2025 16:44:43 +0000Weebly<![CDATA[NeuroEdit's weekly roundup of biomedical publishing news]]>Fri, 13 Mar 2020 11:43:40 GMThttp://www.neuroedit.com/neuroedit-blog/neuroedits-weekly-roundup-of-biomedical-publishing-news5432068

Post by Julia Slone-Murphy

6–13 March
This week, COVID-19 continues to cause havoc as conferences are postponed or cancelled. But biomedical publishing life goes on behind the coronavirus headlines, as researchers examine publication bias and reproducibility, and a dark side to preprints emerges.

Conferences affected by COVID-19
An increasing number of important biomedical and healthcare conferences are being cancelled, postponed or moved online as countries begin to restrict travel and ban public gatherings; even in countries without such restrictions in place yet, conference organisers are taking it upon themselves to protect their delegates. As Cornell's Professor of Organic Chemistry Dave Collum succinctly put it, “Nobody wants to be the chump that held the Meeting of Death".

For now, FENS 2020 is still going ahead in Glasgow in July, but the FENS Brain Conference (planned for April in Rungstedgaard) has been rescheduled until the same time next year.
Cold Spring Harbor Asia have postponed, but not yet rescheduled, three of their upcoming meetings, including Neurotoxicology in the Context of Developmental Neurobiology.
The Cognitive Neuroscience Society's annual meeting CNS 2020 will be moving online. The dates will be announced soon but it will not be held on March 14-17 (the original dates for the conference).
UCL's Centre for Behaviour Change conference CBC 2020 is postponed until further notice.
And the European Association of Science Editors (EASE) conference, which was scheduled to go ahead in June, has been postponed until next year.
Pharmaphorum has a handy (though not exhaustive) list of other medical and pharmaceutical industry conferences that have been affected.

Supporting researchers in low- and middle-income countries
BMJ Global Health published an interesting and important article from the senior editors at Pre-Publication Support Service (PREPPS), whose mission is to increase representation in the academic health sciences literature of authors from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and raise awareness of inequities in global health research. The article looks at the kind of publication support that researchers in LMICs need, from correction of linguistic errors to deeper issues such as how a narrative changes depending on its intended audience.

Guidelines for reporting telomere qPCR results
A review in Molecular Ecology Resources discusses sources of inconsistencies and biases in qPCR results and proposes guidelines for the minimum information that should be given when reporting qPCR telomere assays. The aim of these guidelines is to improve the transparency and clarity of reporting to produce reliable, comparable and reproducible qPCR telomere assays.

Open access boosts citations
Another paper presents data on how open access benefits authors and readers, this time specifically in gastroenterology, but the data can presumably be extrapolated to any field. The authors of this letter in Frontline Gastroenterology (a BMJ journal) note the numerous benefits of open-access publishing, including global equity of access, use of freely available data in new ways that might not have been envisaged by research institutions, and communication of research to the public. The issue of predatory journals offering open access publication for a considerable fee without rigorous peer review is touched on in this brief piece, as is the cost of open access publishing, which can be prohibitory, but Plan S and cOAlition S are mentioned as working towards making open access available to all.

How Twitter users interact with bioRxiv preprints
University of Washington genome scientist Jedidiah Carlson posted an irresistible tweet a couple of days ago, in which he declared his excitement about sharing his “preprint about preprints on Twitter on Twitter". This article by Carlson and University of Washington assistant professor of genome sciences Kelly Harris used topic modelling to investigate how more than 331,000 tweets engaged with 1,800 highly tweeted bioRxiv preprints. Most social media discussion of preprints was between scientists. However, in contrast to the praise of public accessibility to scientific research that surrounds open access publication, Carlson and Harris found that far-right communities appear to be especially active in their engagement with preprints on subjects including the genetic architecture of behavioural traits, and neurological and physiological variation across sexes and genders.

Language and publication bias
The authors of a concerning article in PLOS One this week compared scientific articles on stroke rehabilitation published in English with those published in other languages, and found that studies published in English were better in methodology and quality of reporting, while those published in other languages were likely to overestimate treatment effect. The study relates to the Cochrane Collaboration's recommendations for reducing bias in studies by including non-English articles in literature searches, but raises important questions as to how helpful this practice – which on the surface seems like sensible advice – would really be.

On a related note, an editorial in Pain Medicine discusses implicit (unconscious) and explicit (overt, from sponsors and organisers) bias in consensus development conferences related to medical diagnosis and treatment. The authors call for the recognition and transparent declaration possible bias arising from sponsors' intent and interests, as well as attempts to mitigate such bias, when publishing results from consensus group meetings.

Reproducibility
And finally, a comment in Nature describes the benefits of a project that specifically funds the replication of ongoing research. The Biological Technologies Office at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funded the research proposals of eight research groups with the explicit requirement that they would be shadowed by a team that were to replicate their findings. The article helpfully lists the lessons that have been learned since the project started three years ago that should be heeded by everyone doing research. These include listing the vendor, product number and lot number for all reagents (the authors lost weeks of work expecting that reagents like polyethylene glycol from different vendors could be used interchangeably), and stating acceptable ranges for temperature rather than a single number (which will indicate how sensitive that part of the experiment is to environmental conditions).

]]><![CDATA[NeuroEdit's weekly roundup of biomedical publishing news]]>Fri, 06 Mar 2020 13:06:53 GMThttp://www.neuroedit.com/neuroedit-blog/neuroedits-weekly-roundup-of-biomedical-publishing-news5413886

Post by Julia Slone-Murphy | Photo by Macau Photo Agency on Unsplash

28 February – 6 March
This week, Coronavirus (COVID-19) dominates, China moves to tackle its harmful publish or perish culture and, in lighter news, how art can contribute to science.

Biomedical publishers and scientific organisations rally against COVID-19
Hat tip to the European Association of Science Editors for bringing these resources to our attention.

Elsevier has a free information centre for COVID-19 with resources including guidelines for clinicians and patients. In addition, it has made every research article related to Coronavirus, SARS and MERS freely available!
Springer Nature has also created a COVID-19 information hub and encourages authors to share their submitted research in preprints as well as sharing raw data on the subject whenever possible.
Nature is posting the latest updates on the disease on a dedicated news page.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have made their webinar on COVID-19 that was held yesterday free to access. The webinar is targeted at physicians, nurses, pharmacists, veterinarians, physician assistants, health educators and other clinicians.
And Clarivate Analytics is offering free resources and content on the disease, including a downloadable overview covering causes, symptoms, transmission, mortality, prevention and treatment.

FENS 2020 is going ahead, for now
FENS has issued a statement on COVID-19. It has confirmed that the FENS Forum 2020 in Glasgow in July is still going ahead, at least for now, but they will be monitoring the situation and following guidance from the NHS, the World Health Organization and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. However, FENS does advise arranging cancellation insurance when booking travel.

With a new ban in place, will Chinese research perish?
China's science and education ministries have instructed its research institutions to stop paying bonuses for publishing in journals. Such initiatives have resulted in researchers focusing on quantity over quality of papers, and may have contributed to a rise in fraud, plagiarism and unethical citation practices. While many researchers have welcomed the ban, critics are concerned that it will reduce the country's notable competitiveness in research.

Art and science go hand-in-hand
A beautiful article in the Careers column in Nature explains how an artist residency in a research lab can have surprising benefits for everyone involved. Have you ever considered working with an artist? The researcher and artist who co-authored this column give some excellent tips for making such a collaboration a positive experience for both parties.

]]><![CDATA[The Society for Editors and Proofreaders earns chartership]]>Sun, 01 Mar 2020 11:43:09 GMThttp://www.neuroedit.com/neuroedit-blog/the-society-for-editors-and-proofreaders-earns-chartership

As of today, the Society for Editors and Proofreaders is now the Chartered Institute for Editing and Proofreading! This is a most exciting change for the organisation, and for editing and proofreading as professions. Why this change? In the CIEP's words, "The main aims of becoming chartered are to promote good editing and to raise the value and standing of our profession. Chartered status will allow us to build a greater appreciation of good editing (in its widest sense), based on recognised qualifications, high standards and a better understanding of what editorial professionals do."

Congratulations to all who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to achieve chartership, and here's to a bright future for the CIEP!

Post by Julia Slone-Murphy, Advanced Professional Member of the CIEP

]]><![CDATA[NeuroEdit's Weekly roundup of biomedical publishing news]]>Fri, 28 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMThttp://www.neuroedit.com/neuroedit-blog/neuroedits-weekly-roundup-of-biomedical-publishing-news

Post by Julia Slone-Murphy

21-28 February
This week, there's a buzz about peer review research while Molecular Brain updates its policy on data sharing, and more journals go open access.

Research on research
The BMJ published an editorial about how important it is to research peer review and biomedical publication, saying that such research is essential to the quality of evidence that healthcare is based on. The editorial highlights the wealth of data held by journal publishers from an abundance of submitted manuscripts, but points out that editors don't have enough time or expertise to analyse them, whereas researchers have the skills but can't access the data. The authors urge funding bodies to support such research, and publishers to partner with the BMJ in conducting it. https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m661.long (free)

Similarly, Nature published a call from a group of authors involved in the PEERE collaboration, for journals, funders and researchers to create an infrastructure to study peer review. They highlight that such calls have been put out for decades, yet little research has been done. The article outlines questions that should be investigated and strategies for sharing anonymised peer review data. The authors argue that an agreement on sharing peer review data could be a clear way of distinguishing legitimate journals from predatory ones, stating that peer review research will benefit authors, reviewers and editors, and increase the reliability of the scientific literature. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00500-y (free)

Where are the data?
The Editor-in-Chief of Molecular Brain has released some shocking figures on responses to his requests for raw data as part of his editorial decisions on 41 submitted manuscripts. He writes, “more than 97% of the 41 manuscripts did not present the raw data supporting their results when requested by an editor, suggesting a possibility that the raw data did not exist from the beginning" and calls for journals to encourage authors to provide their raw data in a publicly accessible database. This approach should go some way towards tackling the reproducibility crisis and boost the public's trust in scientific research. https://molecularbrain.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13041-020-0552-2 (free)

Opening access
The International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research has transitioned to a fully open access journal. Its publisher, Wiley, states that going open access significantly increases downloads and readership of articles, giving greater visibility to authors and to the research published in the journal. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/mpr.1817 (free)

And European Science Editing, the journal published by the European Association of Science Editors, has also moved from printed content to fully digital and open access, with articles being published as they are accepted. This is great news, as it will allow everyone who's interested in how best to communicate their research to access the valuable insights published in this journal, such as how to report values with an appropriate degree of precision. https://ese.arphahub.com/article/50999/ (free)

]]><![CDATA[Write well to... communicate science]]>Tue, 20 Nov 2018 23:10:47 GMThttp://www.neuroedit.com/neuroedit-blog/write-well-to-communicate-science

Post by Julia Slone-Murphy | Photo by Hawksky on Pixabay

This is my final post in this series – so allow me to climb onto my soapbox. I believe this is the most important reason for making your manuscript as good as it can be. If you take one thing from this series, make it this: your readers are not just your peers.

Science is not an exclusive club. Think about the reason you became a researcher; I’m pretty sure it wasn’t because you wanted to compete with your colleagues, fight for funding, or scramble up the career ladder. Most people become researchers to make valuable contributions to society and humanity.

Arguably the most important aspect of writing about science well is to improve science communication as a whole, both for specialist readers and, as far as possible, for any reader. In my view, this is an essential part of scientific publishing.

Think about who might read your paper
Readers can be specialists in your field, in another field, or people who don’t work in research at all. Even if you publish in a journal that's behind a paywall, remember that the abstract can be read by everyone: this includes people seeking information about a medical condition; people in animal rights groups; the media; and people from all walks of life. It’s important to keep these readers in mind from the very first word you write. In particular, it’s worth considering the people who will benefit from the experiments described in your manuscript.

Keep the nonspecialist reader in mind
If you write a stuffy paper full of jargon and long sentences, chances are it will still be published as long as the science is good and the methods are sound. But it will be difficult for anyone outside your field to read; and it will be impenetrable to those who are not familiar with the field. Similarly, if you submit a sloppy paper, riddled with linguistic errors, it might still be published, but the errors may be distracting for the reader and cause them to lose trust in your research.

Writing with the nonspecialist reader in mind doesn’t mean dumbing down the science, or writing the whole paper in lay terms. It just means:

introducing each concept enough that the intelligent reader can get the gist of it instead of feeling alienated;
describing to the reader what you want them to see in your results, even if it seems obvious to you;
making sure your arguments follow on logically from one another;
providing a clear take-home message.

Your role in public engagement
You don’t need to be David Attenborough to engage with the public. You don’t have to be an extrovert, or great with kids, or know how to “make science fun”, or be able to confidently explain your research using sporting analogies.

When you’re writing, just include a few sentences that would help a non-specialist understand the most important points of your study. How would you explain the take-home message to your neighbour, your dentist, or a family member? Journals are finally getting on board with this, with an increasing number encouraging authors to write “Highlights" and plain-language summaries. But the same points can easily be made in the Abstract and main text, even if specific lay descriptions are not required by the journal.

If every researcher did this when writing their manuscripts, it would go a long way towards bridging the void between what scientists and the public understand.

This post concludes our introductory series on the importance of writing research manuscripts well. We’ve explained how writing clearly and engagingly can help you not only communicate science to different audiences, but also beat your competition, get a better peer review, reduce research waste, and publish more effectively.

What would you like us to write about next? Comment below with your questions and suggestions!

We know it can take a lot of time and effort to consider and implement everything we’ve described in this series, but it is worth it. If you feel your time would be better spent doing research than writing about it, scientific editing companies like NeuroEdit exist to take some of this pressure off you. Feel free to send us your draft and we'll be happy to discuss how we can help you improve your chances of fast acceptance, write with the nonspecialist in mind, and even boost citations once the paper is published. Contact us.

Previous post: Write well to publish effectively

Next post: Coming soon!

]]><![CDATA[Write well to... publish effectively]]>Tue, 20 Nov 2018 21:48:57 GMThttp://www.neuroedit.com/neuroedit-blog/write-well-to-publish-effectively

Post by Julia Slone-Murphy | Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels

So you’ve written your paper and it’s been accepted for publication – hooray! But that’s not the end of the story. There’s little point in publishing if your paper is never going to be cited, or perhaps even read! The way you write your manuscript can not only help you get published but can also serve to boost citations.

Understand your readership
Who will be most interested in your study? Answering this will help you decide which journal to submit the manuscript to. The highly specialised Journal of Vestibular Research: Equilibrium & Orientation will have a very different reader demographic than a broad-ranging journal like Nature, or an open-access mega-journal like PLOS One. As you draft your manuscript, consider your target reader, choose an appropriate journal, and write appropriately for its readership.

Use good keywords and effective phrasing
The main way research papers are found today is by online searches, and the number of papers appearing in search results is growing at an eye-watering pace. By choosing good keywords and phrasing that include the words people are likely to search for, you’ll have more chance of your paper being near the top of those search results.

But beware of “keyword-stuffing”. Repeating certain words and phrases throughout the manuscript might help you get to the front page of Google Scholar, but your reader will be human and is not going to appreciate too much repetition. So write for your reader, not for Google’s algorithms; just bear in mind what that reader might be searching for when they want to find papers in your field.

Break it down
Long sentences are hard to read, and important information gets lost in them. Writing in short sentences can make complex concepts easy to understand, remember, explain, and discuss. And ultimately, you want your research discussed and remembered – at conferences, in other people’s papers, and even by the public.

Similarly, consider writing your take-home message in fewer than 280 characters, because this invites tweets! Twitter is full of scientists discussing and sharing research, so the easier you make it to share your main finding in a tweet, the more chance it has of being seen, retweeted, shared, discussed, and cited.

Next, find out my view on considering the public when writing a journal article. And if you missed it, catch up on the previous post in this series, where I explain how writing well can help you reduce research waste.

At NeuroEdit, we help researchers create the best possible version of their manuscript before submitting to a journal. We work with native and non-native English speakers at all stages of their career. If you're writing a paper and the information we've listed above sounds too time-consuming or too difficult to implement, we can help. We can shorten sentences while retaining important information, ensure the arguments in your paper are clear, help you write engagingly, and more - usually within a week, and often for around the price of an antibody! Contact us to see how we can help you publish more effectively.

Previous post: Write well to reduce research waste

Next post: Write well to communicate science

]]><![CDATA[Write well to... reduce research waste]]>Tue, 20 Nov 2018 15:18:08 GMThttp://www.neuroedit.com/neuroedit-blog/write-well-to-reduce-research-waste

Post by Julia Slone-Murphy | Photo by Gary Chan on Unsplash

A shocking amount of health research is thrown away. Are you sitting down?

It’s estimated that 85% of all health research is avoidably wasted. This happens because:

completed research isn't always published
published reports are often not clear, complete, or accurate enough for others to understand and replicate the data
studies are not set in the context of a thorough literature review, and so they don't build upon previous lessons learned.

All these issues can be rectified by careful, accurate and complete reporting.

But how do you know what to report? Thankfully, there is plenty of help out there. Guidelines have been developed and published specifically to help authors remember all the essential points that should be included when writing about a study. There are more than 400 of them (all named with catchy acronyms) covering every kind of study. Major ones include CONSORT for randomised clinical trials, STROBE for observational studies, PRISMA for systematic reviews, and ARRIVE for animal studies.

For example, if you're reporting on a clinical trial, the CONSORT guidelines will help ensure you include the following in your report (among many other points):

In the title: the words “randomised trial”, so that the report can be indexed correctly.
In the introduction: reference to a systematic review of the subject area - or a note that there isn't one - to show that your participants were not unnecessarily exposed to the risks of research.
In the methods: a full description of the trial design, including whether it was parallel, crossover, factorial, etc.; how the participants were randomised; and what the inclusion and exclusion criteria were (and if there were any changes to them once the study had commenced).
In the results: a flow chart of the participants to show enrolment, randomisation, treatment allocation, dropouts or losses to follow-up, and analysis; baseline data; primary and other outcomes; and any reports of harms or unintended effects.
In the discussion: an acknowledgement of the study's limitations, and a balanced interpretation of the results.

Is it compulsory to follow these guidelines?
Some journals do require submitted manuscripts to follow reporting guidelines, but many more just recommend doing so. So for most journals, no, following these guidelines is not compulsory. However, in my strong opinion, it seems senseless to ignore them, especially given the shocking statistic on waste, which is largely a result of authors not following such guidelines. Reporting your study completely - by following the appropriate guideline and including all the information listed in the checklist for that guideline - will benefit you, your colleagues, and the field as a whole. In addition, it will avoid wasting the valuable resources used in your study - whether this means the money you spent on reagents and equipment, animals that were sacrificed in the pursuit of scientific advancement, or human volunteers who gave their time and exposed themselves to the risks of research.

All the guidelines named above - and hundreds more - are listed in a searchable database from the Equator Network, which also has a flow chart and tools to help you choose the most appropriate guideline for your study.

Next, find out how you can write in a way that helps boost citations once you've published! And if you missed it, catch up on the previous post in this series, where I explain how writing well can help you improve the peer review process.

At NeuroEdit, we help researchers publish faster and more effectively. We work with native and non-native English speakers at all stages of their career. If you're writing a paper and all the information we've listed above sounds too time-consuming or too difficult to implement, we can help. Not only can we ensure your manuscript follows the right guideline for your study, but we will also eliminate linguistic errors, make your writing engaging, showcase your figures professionally (including CONSORT flowcharts), and more - usually within a week, and often for around the price of an antibody! Contact us to see how we can help you improve your manuscript.

Previous post: Write well to improve peer review

Next post: Write well to publish effectively

]]><![CDATA[Write well to... Improve peer review]]>Tue, 20 Nov 2018 14:22:25 GMThttp://www.neuroedit.com/neuroedit-blog/write-well-to-improve-peer-review

Post by Julia Slone-Murphy

Peer reviewers are busy people. You may have already reviewed a manuscript yourself and know first-hand how the review has to be squeezed in between writing, teaching, and mentoring duties – oh, and actual research – all on a voluntary basis.

The review often ends up being done in the evenings, at weekends, or even on holiday, so it’s important to make it as easy as possible. A carefully prepared manuscript is more likely to enter peer review in the first place, go through the process faster, and get a respectful and helpful review.

1. Enter peer review
If the manuscript is in good shape and suitable for the journal, it’s likely that the editor will send it on to peer reviewers. But if it doesn’t fit the journal’s aims and scope, if it doesn’t follow the journal’s author instructions, if the importance and novelty of the study are not clear, or if the data do not support the hypotheses and conclusions, the editor might not feel it’s appropriate to send on to reviewers. In this case, you would receive an editorial rejection. Although these tend to be relatively quick, they still waste time for you and the editorial team, and can be avoided by more careful manuscript preparation.

2. Speed through peer review
The more clearly and engagingly your manuscript is written, the easier it will be to read and understand, and the faster it will be reviewed. We’ve all read that paper where we realise half-way through that we’ve hardly understood anything, so we go back and read it again, and again... then arm ourselves with a pencil and highlighter, then read it again while scribbling and underlining. This type of writing is not kind to the reader – especially when that reader is voluntarily reviewing your paper on their holiday! We’ve also all read beautifully written papers that explain complex concepts so elegantly that they seem simple, and we can understand them on the first read. This is the kind of manuscript to aim for, and it makes the review go so much faster.

3. Get a respectful and helpful review
Even if you’re on a tight deadline, take the time to check your paper for avoidable errors. If a manuscript seems thrown together, this can make reviewers less than polite – and, quite frankly, grumpy. Here at NeuroEdit, we help authors respond to peer review, and we’ve seen some pretty cutting comments that have little to do with the study and instead focus on the way the manuscript has been written. This is neither a good use of the reviewer’s time nor any good for the authors’ confidence. Eliminate basic problems like language errors, missing citations, inconsistent abbreviations, or accidental repetitions before submitting your manuscript. This will go a long way to getting the reviewer on your side.

Getting the reviewer on your side is helpful for you, too. The purpose of peer review is to give you expert feedback on the quality of your research, the appropriateness of your methods, the robustness of your data, and the soundness of your conclusions – not comments about typos, misplaced commas or incorrect tenses. Eliminating those kinds of errors before you submit your paper will help the reviewer do their best work, and you’ll be helping yourself receive useful, constructive comments about the science in your paper.

Next, find out how writing well can help reduce the huge amount of waste that plagues the health research industry. And if you missed it, catch up on the previous post in the series, where I explain how careful preparation of a manuscript can help you publish before your competitors.

At NeuroEdit, we help researchers create the best possible version of their manuscript before submitting to a journal. We work with native and non-native English speakers at all stages of their career. If you're writing a paper and all the information we've listed above sounds too time-consuming or too difficult to implement, we can help. We can eliminate linguistic errors, ensure the arguments in your paper are clear, make your writing engaging, showcase your figures professionally, write an effective cover letter, format the manuscript to any journal's instructions, and more - usually within a week, and often for around the price of an antibody! Contact us to see how we can help you improve your manuscript.

Previous post: Write well to beat the competition

Next post: Write well to reduce research waste

]]><![CDATA[Write well to... Beat the competition]]>Mon, 19 Nov 2018 16:32:32 GMThttp://www.neuroedit.com/neuroedit-blog/write-well-to-beat-the-competition

Photo by Steven Lelham on Unsplash

Publishing is essential for your research career. It provides visibility for your work, satisfies funding conditions, demonstrates your capability as a researcher and your input to the scientific community, and updates your peers on the current state of knowledge. But it’s easier said than done...

Acceptance rates for many journals are less than 30%. And unfortunately, there's a lot of emphasis on novelty when publishing research; getting “scooped” (when another group is first to publish findings similar to yours) can damage your scientific reputation. This is particularly frustrating if it happens while you’re revising your paper, or even while your paper is under review.

So how can you help speed your manuscript into that small pile of accepted papers?

1. Follow the instructions
Once you’ve chosen an appropriate journal for your manuscript, check its guidelines. These guidelines – which might be called “instructions to authors”, “information for authors”, “manuscript submission guidelines”, or a variation on that theme – can be found on every journal website. Some are stricter or more extensive than others, and different publishers put them in different places on their websites, but it’s very important to find them and follow them appropriately. Not doing so might result in your manuscript being returned to you without review, for reasons that are nothing to do with your research.

Even if your manuscript gets through to the review stage, neglecting to follow the guidelines can still cause unnecessary delays. Author guidelines cover specifics such as article types, title page information, text and reference formatting, order of sections, word limits, artwork instructions, statements on ethics and conflicts of interest, and often much more. If anything is missing or incorrect, it’s likely to be sent back to you for correction, causing a delay that could have been easily avoided.

Journal editors are inundated with submissions, and you want to make their lives as simple as possible, so following their instructions is an easy, respectful, and essential first step when preparing your manuscript.

2. Write clearly
The more clearly you present your arguments in your manuscript, the easier it will be to read. Instead of getting bogged down in “scientific” writing, write as if you’re explaining your study to a colleague or friend in a different field.

The main messages you want to get across are:

why you did this study
how you did this study
what you found.

Once you’ve clearly stated those overarching points, you can go into the details; but if those three points are not well made, any smaller details might confuse the reader. This might sound obvious, but when you know your study inside-out, it's very easy to forget to explain the basics! It's one of the most common mistakes we see at NeuroEdit.

In addition, each section of the paper should follow a clear structure. Again, as if you’re talking to a colleague in another field, guide the reader through the background and rationale without too much jargon, in short and simple sentences. Provide just enough information for them to understand why the study is important and what impact it may have in your field.

3. Write engagingly
This may not be something you’ve thought about when writing your research manuscripts, but the more engagingly you write, the more likely it will be that the reader will notice your paper, read the whole thing, and be able to pay close attention to what you’ve written. By writing engagingly, you'll make it easier for them to concentrate on the science.

You’re passionate about the research you’re doing; show this to the reader and help them understand why they should care about it just as much as you do!

Point out where the novelty is
Explain the impact you expect the study to have in the field
Show them where your research can be taken next.

Grab the reader's attention from the first word of the title, and encourage them to keep reading until the last word of the conclusion.

Take-home message
All these points can be summarised as “keep the reader in mind”. The “reader” includes the journal editor, the reviewers, and those reading the published paper. Make their life easier, be respectful of their time, and encourage them to keep reading, by following instructions and writing clearly and engagingly.

At NeuroEdit, we help researchers create the best possible version of their manuscript before submitting it to a journal. We work with native and non-native English speakers at all stages of their career. If you're writing a paper and all the information we've listed above sounds too time-consuming or too difficult to implement, we can help. We can eliminate linguistic errors, ensure the arguments in your paper are clear, make your writing engaging, showcase your figures professionally, write an effective cover letter, format the manuscript to any journal's instructions, and more - usually within a week, and often for around the price of an antibody! Contact us to see how we can help you improve your manuscript.

Previous post: Why write well? Our introduction to the series.

Next post: Write well to improve peer review

]]><![CDATA[Why write well? (A 5-part series)]]>Mon, 19 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMThttp://www.neuroedit.com/neuroedit-blog/why-write-well-a-5-part-series

Post by Julia Slone-Murphy

Research papers are boring, aren’t they?

They have a set structure: introduction, methods, results, discussion, yawn
There's little room for artful storytelling
And the abstract tells you everything you need to know in 250 words – it's one big spoiler.

But they serve a vital purpose: the communication of research methods and findings. Within each manuscript is a detailed report of why and how you did the study, and what you found, so that the reader can be updated on the current state of knowledge and, if they wish, replicate all or part of the study.

So as long as you write up what you did, without going over the word limit of your target journal, that's all there is to publishing and putting the paper on your CV, right?

Wrong! In this series, I'll explain how writing about research well can help you ensure peer reviewers do their best work, reduce research waste, attract citations, and communicate science to different audiences, including the public. But first, and most pressingly, how writing well can help you publish before your competitors.

Previous post: Welcome!

Next post: Write well to beat the competition.

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