So in this next module, I'm going to wrap up a few points about writing scientific
manuscripts before we jump into talking about the publication process.
So first of all, I want to talk a little bit about authorship.
Of course, this is a very important topic, and also sometimes a little tricky, so my
main advice on authorship is to kind of think about the authorship before you
write the papers, especially if you are the person writing up the paper.
Think about who's gonna get authorship, think about what the order will be, kind
of, run that by people and establish that early on in a process, so everybody's on
the same page, so you don't run into any issues after the paper is written.
There's sort of two questions you have to answer with authorship.
So first of all, who gets authorship? Who are you gonna include as an author on
your paper? Again, if you're the primary person
writing out the paper, who else are you gonna include as authors.
So, the main criteria in here is that any author listed on the paper's title page.
Any author of the paper should take public responsibility for it's content.
And that's a fairly high bar. That means you know, that.
If you're going to be an author on a paper.
That's a pretty high bar that you have, you have to be willing to take public
responsibility for that articles content. And that means that if the paper is later
out to have a problem with it, to have fraud even, to be retracted for some
reason. If you are the author, you are
responsible. You are reliable.
That is going to reflect badly on you. So really consider Whether or not,
especially if it's not the paper you're writing if you're a coauthor.
Whether or not you really want to be an author on the paper.
And if you're the one writing up the paper and you're figuring out you know who
should I offer authorship to on the paper, keep in mind that a lot of scientists and
a lot of authors don't want to be including on your paper unless they can
take public responsibility for its content.
So for example, you know sometimes I'll give a little help to somebody on
statistics or editing or something and then they'll come back and say oh you know
do you want to be an author on the paper. And I do not want to be an author on that
paper because I can't take responsibility for its content.
And I haven't Been intricately involved, with its content.
So, so just keep in mind that sometimes, I think especially junior people feel this
obligation to include every senior person, person that they've even talked to about
the article. In fact, people don't wanna be on your
paper, unless they really can take public responsibility for its content.
So, so they're not gonna be offended if you don't offer them authorship.
If you really feel that somebody need to acknowledge for some little help they gave
you on the paper that doesn't lead any authorship considering, considering
acknowledging them in the acknowledgement section I will talk about that in a
minute. So just, you know, again its kind of a
high bar and some times authors just get thrown on there for, for bad reasons and
really we want to keep it to the people who, really can take public responsibility
for its content. And then of course there is the issue of
what order will the authors appear in and in general of course that the order
implies the author's relative contributions.
So the first author is usually the person that actually wrote up the draft of the
paper, it might have been the person that collected all of the data, you know often
a graduate student or a junior person There's one exception to this position
thing, is that the, the last position, the very last author is often a senior author.
So that's a position of stature if your in the last position.
So just realize that the senior person often would go there.
So again, the senior author, the head of the lab or research team, often will be
the last listed author. So that's good to know.
Occasionally, you know, you might have two graduate students who both did equal work
on a paper and you really want to give them both equal credit,
You can consider doing dual first authors, that's done sometimes to help in those
situations. Sometimes you have a clear first author
and a clear last author. The person who wrote up the paper is the
first author, the senior person is the last author, the advisor or whatever.
But then you've got a number of people who made substantial contributions, and
they're gonna be coauthors, but they kind of contributed equally, there's no
differentiation between those. So for fairness, you know, how do you
order those people that kinda come in between?
You consider, could consider alphabetical order, or even reverse alphabetical order.
I was involved in a series of studies, which we had a number of people who were
very central to, to writing the study, a number of principal investigators.
Different cites in the study. So they were on a series of papers that
came out with those studies. So on the first paper we put them on
alphabetical order the second paper we put the in reverse alphabetical order for
fairness. And sometimes you get these large working
groups now with lots and lots of people, multi-, you know, international
collaborations. So those working groups can be cited as a
group because they may have hundreds of authors.
Just be aware that if you are an author on a paper, usually you have to fill out a
conflict of interest form. It's usually a specific form.
They're a little bit different for each journal.
But all the authors have to fill that out. If you're the person submitting the paper,
keep in mind that you're going to have to get all the authors to fill those forms
out. So leave some time for that.
It's very important that they identify any.
Relevant conflicts of interest. All others also usually have to sign some
kind of copyright transfer form for the journal, so again, you need to leave time,
if you've got multiple authors on a paper, to make sure you can get all those
signatures. And some journals actually have forms that
require the authors to specify exactly what their involvement was in the
manuscript. These are really helpful, because then
it's really clear to people whether or not they, you know, should be an author on the
paper. So they have to check off.
Did they in, participate in the study planning, the data collection, data
analysis. So it's really good to, for the journals
to feel comfortable, and sometimes, the journals actually even publish this in.
And the manuscript, so you'd know exactly who did what in the paper.
As I mentioned, there's all Generally a lot of papers have an acknowledgment
section. That's where you're going to site any
funding sources. So if you're a graduate student who is on
a certain fellowship, make sure you site your funding source there.
If it was a NIH sponsored study, or whatever, whoever sponsored the study, if
there was a, if it was a grant-funded study, you're gonna mention a grant there.
So you put the funding sources in the acknowledgments.
This is also the really good place to acknowledge people who you don't feel
merit authorship and who probably don't want to be authors on the paper because
again, they can't take that public responsibilityi.
Ability for it. But maybe they gave you some materials,
they offer some. Statistical consulting, some advice.
It's a way to, to acknowledge those people without having them, having to take on the
role of author. And then finally I just wanna briefly
mention references. I already talked about references in an
earlier module and about avoiding references to nowhere and making sure that
you get your references right. My biggest recommendation on references is
to use a computerized bibliographic program.
These will, are just so efficient, they will increase your efficiency greatly.
They will prevent you from making errors in the references.
So it's really worth investing in that kinda program, something like something
like endnote. If you have computerized bibliographic
program you don't have to worry about things like this.
Journals differ in how the, in how you order those references in the reference
section, some journals want alphabetical order, some journals want how, the order
in which those references appear in the text, so, If, if you're not using a
computerized program, you're gonna have to figure that out and, it's a real pain to
switch between the two. So let's say you submit to one journal
that wants alphabetical order, and then it gets rejected and you have to submit to
another journal where they want order of appearance.
Switching those manually, and I've had to do it in the past, switching those
manually is a huge headache, it takes hours of time, and human error can get
introduced at that point. So again, you're best off using that
program that will do that automatically for you.
Be aware that some journals limit the number of references.
Figure this out ahead of time before you start writing the manuscript.
I've had the situation where, we had something like 45 references.
And then somebody realized that the journal we were submitting to only allowed
30. It is incredibly hard to go back and take
references out. Because your whole text kinda depends on
those references. So you have to make major changes to your
text. So find out ahead of time if there's a
limit on the number of references. And follow journal formatting rules.
Again, if you're using a computerized program, that program will know all of the
specifics of how each journal likes their formatting done.
So it'll save you a headache. Otherwise, you've gotta go to the
instructions for authors. Or, you know go to a paper that's already
published in that journal. And just look at how their references are
formatted. So here's an example.
Sort of a typical way that references are formatted.
You've got the author's name. It's usually the last name.
And then their first and middle initial if they have one with no punctuation.
At the end of that list, there's a period. Some journals will have you list all of
the authors. Some will have you list three within the
et al. So, again, you gotta know which it is for
a particular journal. Then, there's the title comes next.
Then, the journal name in italics. It's usually abbreviated and again you've
gotta follow the standards for abbreviation.
The computerized program, the bibliographic program, will know that.
Then, usually have th-, the year of date not the month, but just the year, a
semicolon, and then the volume, a colon and the page numbers.
And again. Different journals will have slight
differences as in that how you format those.
So make sure you figure that out. Or, use a program that already knows how
to format for all the journals. The proceeding program is copyrighted by
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