skillful writing of an awful research paper seven rules to follow

Skillful writing of an awful research paper

• PMID: 21226462
• DOI: 10.1021/ac2000169

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Skillful writing of an awful research paper

• Posted on: 12 March 2018

Royce Murray, the editor of the Analytical Chemistry magazine, shares his experience on writing scientific reports in an unorthodox way. He does not give advice on good writing elements, because "like contrary children, for some authors such advice seems to vanish like smoke in a wind..." Very good things to keep in mind when writing research papers, especially for the one with less experience. Read the half-page article here (fixed link)

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学术论文写作：Skillful writing of an awful research paper

以下是《分析化学》杂志前任编辑Royce Murray教授的一篇精彩短文，他采取反其道而行之的思路，给大家提供了写一篇垃圾学术论文需要遵循的七条规则。这篇小论文是一块宝石，它从反面提醒你在学术论文写作时，你所能做的最糟糕的事情。

Skillful writing of an awful research paper

熟练地写一篇垃圾学术论文

As a Editor, I have from time to time in this column offered advice to authors on the desirable elements of a good research report.

作为一名编辑，我不时在这个专栏中向作者提供建议：一份好的研究报告应该具备的基本要素。

Like contrary children, for some authors such advice seems to vanish like smoke in a wind.

就像叛逆的孩子一样，对有些作者来说，这样的建议似乎就像风中的烟雾一样消失了。

So I take here a different approach, based on the idea that some folks have a knack for doing the opposite of what is recommended to them (like contrary children).

所以我在这里采取不同的方法，因为有些人习惯于做与建议相反的事情，就像叛逆的孩子一样。

I present some guidelines for how to prepare a research report that is variously boring, confusing, misleading, or generally uninformative.

我为如何准备一份研究报告提供了一些指导方针，这份报告可能会令人感到各种无聊、困惑、误导或者整体上缺乏信息。

Whether the author's project is imaginative (or not) and the experiments are done with skill (or not) and the data are scientifically meaningful (or not) is irrelevant.

不管作者的项目是否有创新性，不管实验做得是否熟练，也不管数据是否具有科学价值，这些都是无关紧要的。

My advice is solely based on principles of presenting the objectives, experiments, results, and conclusion in a fashion that as such no one will finish reading them or, if they do, readers will have little chance of understanding or remembering them.

我的建议完全基于以这样一种方式呈现目标、实验、结果和结论的原则，即没有人会读完它们，或者如果读完了，读者几乎没有机会理解或记住它们。

Like any form of skillful writing, following the rules below for awful writing requires practice and a lack of mental concentration.

就像任何形式的熟练写作一样，遵循下面的规则进行拙劣写作需要练习和缺乏注意力。

Rule 1. Never explain the objectives of the paper in a single sentence or paragraph and in particular never at the beginning of the paper.

规则1：决不要用一句话或一段话来解释论文的目的，尤其不要在论文开头。

Rule 2. Similarly, never describe the experiment in a single sentence or paragraph and never at the beginning.

Instead, to enhance the reader’s pleasure of discovery, treat your experiment as a mystery, in which you divulge one essential detail on this page and a hint of one on the next and complete the last details only after a few results have been presented.

It’s also really fun to divulge the reason that the experiment should successfully provide the information sought only at the very end of the paper, as any good mystery writer would do.

同样，永远不要用一句话或一段话来描述实验，也不要在开头。

相反，为了增强读者的发现乐趣，将你的实验视为一个谜，你可以在本页透露一个重要的细节，在下一页暗示一个细节，只有在给出一些结果后才完成最后的细节。

正如任何一位优秀的推理小说作者所做的那样：在论文的最后，透露实验应该成功地提供所需信息的原因，这也是非常有趣的。

Rule 3. Diagrams are worth a thousand words, so in the interest of writing a concise paper, omit all words that explain the diagram, including labels. Let the reader use his/her fertile imagination.

规则3：图表胜过千言万语，所以为了写一篇简明的论文，（你应该）省略所有解释图表的单词，包括标签。让读者发挥自己丰富的想象力。

Rule 4. Great writers invent abbreviations for complex topics, which also saves a lot of words. Really short abbreviations should be used for very complex topics, and more complicated ones for simple ideas.

规则4：伟大的作家为复杂的主题发明缩写，这也节省了大量的单词。非常短的缩写应该用于非常复杂的主题，而更复杂的缩写则用于简单的想法。

Rule 5. In referring to the previous literature, be careful to cite only the papers that make claims that would support your own, especially those that contain little evidence for the claim, so that your paper shines in comparison.

规则5：在参考之前的文献时，（你应该）要注意只引用那些支持你观点的论文，尤其是那些几乎没有证据支持你观点的论文，这样你的论文就会在比较中脱颖而出。

Rule 6. It should be anathema to use any original phrasing or humor in your language, so as to adhere to the principle that scientific writing must be stiff and formal and without personality.

规则6：在你的语言中使用任何原创的措辞或幽默都是应该被诅咒的，这样才能坚持科学写作必须生硬、正式、没有个性的原则。

Rule 7. Your readers are intelligent folks, so don’t bother to explain your reasoning in the interpretation of the results. Especially don’t bother to point out their impact on or consistency with other authors’ results and interpretation, so that your paper can be an island of original thinking.

规则7：你的读者都是聪明人，所以（你）在解释结果时不必费心解释你的推理。尤其是，（你）不要费心指出它们对其他作者的结果和解释的影响或它们与其他作者的结果和解释的一致性，这样你的论文就可以成为原创思维的孤岛。

So these are a few simple rules for poor scientific writing. If you follow them faithfully and your paper is rejected or never cited, irrespective of your native brilliance, you have nonetheless been successful as a poor writer.

以上是一些针对拙劣的科学写作的简单规则。如果你忠实地遵循它们，不管你天生多么聪明，你的论文要么被拒绝，要么从未被引用；尽管如此，你仍然是一个成功的蹩脚作者。

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How to Write a Poor Research Paper

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The presentation of research results is definitely an important part of any scientific article. On the one hand, the findings of the conducted research should be explained in as much detail as possible, whereas on the other, the obtained results must be clear, understandable and relevant. The previous editorials analysed the elements of a scientific article such as the title and summary (Lamanauskas, 2019a), introduction (Lamanauskas, 2019b) and the description of methodology (Lamanauskas, 2020). This editorial briefly discusses the optimal presentation of research results treated as one of the most interesting stages in preparing a scientific article and requires effort, intensive work and creativity. Alternatively, both methodology and research results (empirical research in particular) are considered the most important parts of a manuscript (Fox & Jennings, 2014). As expected, many important points related to the description of research results are given in APA 7th. ed. (2019), and therefore are not intended to be discussed in detail. Although APA standards are widespread, other criteria are also admitted by scientific community and focus in this editorial is more oriented on the practical subjects of academic writing and the most common mistakes.

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Jefrei Lopez

General Comments ScientiÞc research demands precision. ScientiÞc writing should reßect this precision in the form of clarity. Unfortunately , a glance at almost any scientiÞc journal will reveal that the above-stated ideal is often not attained in the real world of scholarly publication. Indeed, many of the accusations by non-scientiÞsts of "obscurity" and "elitism" within the scientiÞc community probably originate in the sad fact that many scientists are not capable of expressing their hypotheses and conclusions clearly and simply. Fortunately, much of the confusion can be eliminated if writing is considered part of the pretentiousness. In practical terms, the Þrst of those two suggestions implies that as much effort and consideration should be given to the organization of the paper as was given to the execution of the study, and the second implies that the writer should employ crisp sentences not cluttered with excess verbiage. The purpose of this handout is to help you achieve your goals. This argument may seem more compelling if we look at it in terms of dollars. Much is spent to perform research, and the publication is the distillate of that expensive work, all that will survive and communicate what was learned. Moreover , the scientist pays to have papers published, currently $50 per page for many journals. If the content is not clear, the research will be lost, and the money spent to perform it was wasted. If the text is verbose, the author will pay dearly in page charges. Do not consider the following guidelines as unbreakable rules. The particular format and style adopted for a given paper depend upon both the nature of the report and the journal or other publication in which the paper is to be published. For our purposes, we will use the format of Ecology, the publication of the Ecological Society of America; refer to recent issues as models. All journals publish "Instructions to Authors" annually in one of the issues. In other words, there is often more than one "correct" way of doing something, depending on your intentions. However, the practices adopted here are straightforward and intuitively simple. You are advised to become familiar with details of organization , section headings, methods of data presentation, and ways of citing and listing references by examining recent papers in any well-established scientiÞc journal.

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The Abstract is a summary of the study, with the primary emphasis on results and conclusions. • Very briefly present the question(s) asked, the experimental design, a summary of observations, and list conclusions.

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Writing a scientific article is not an easy task, but it is definitely a great satisfaction to be able to conclude and publish it. Indeed, each publication is a service we make to the entire scientific community and to the advancement of science even before our personal career. There is and there will not be a final book/article for writing a scientific paper. Therefore, some knowledge is a decisive factor to increase the chances of our work being accepted by a specialized scientific journal. The purpose of this editorial is to trace an ideal path, based on our personal experience, useful to properly structure a scientific article, from bibliographic research to cover letter. Articles should not be written in a polished way to gratify one's own ego, but they must be written for anyone who can read and understand them. V.

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Open Access

Ten Simple Rules for Writing Research Papers

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Department of Genetics, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri, United States of America

• Weixiong Zhang

Published: January 30, 2014

• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003453
• Reader Comments

Citation: Zhang W (2014) Ten Simple Rules for Writing Research Papers. PLoS Comput Biol 10(1): e1003453. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003453

Editor: Philip E. Bourne, University of California San Diego, United States of America

Copyright: © 2014 Weixiong Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ., which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: The author received no specific funding for this article.

Competing interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist.

The importance of writing well can never be overstated for a successful professional career, and the ability to write solid papers is an essential trait of a productive researcher. Writing and publishing a paper has its own life cycle; properly following a course of action and avoiding missteps can be vital to the overall success not only of a paper but of the underlying research as well. Here, we offer ten simple rules for writing and publishing research papers.

As a caveat, this essay is not about the mechanics of composing a paper, much of which has been covered elsewhere, e.g., [1] , [2] . Rather, it is about the principles and attitude that can help guide the process of writing in particular and research in general. In this regard, some of the discussion will complement, extend, and refine some advice given in early articles of this Ten Simple Rules series of PLOS Computational Biology [3] – [8] .

Rule 1: Make It a Driving Force

Never separate writing a paper from the underlying research. After all, writing and research are integral parts of the overall enterprise. Therefore, design a project with an ultimate paper firmly in mind. Include an outline of the paper in the initial project design documents to help form the research objectives, determine the logical flow of the experiments, and organize the materials and data to be used. Furthermore, use writing as a tool to reassess the overall project, reevaluate the logic of the experiments, and examine the validity of the results during the research. As a result, the overall research may need to be adjusted, the project design may be revised, new methods may be devised, and new data may be collected. The process of research and writing may be repeated if necessary.

Rule 2: Less Is More

It is often the case that more than one hypothesis or objective may be tackled in one project. It is also not uncommon that the data and results gathered for one objective can serve additional purposes. A decision on having one or more papers needs to be made, and the decision will be affected by various factors. Regardless of the validity of these factors, the overriding consideration must be the potential impact that the paper may have on the research subject and field. Therefore, the significance, completeness, and coherence of the results presented as a whole should be the principal guide for selecting the story to tell, the hypothesis to focus upon, and materials to include in the paper, as well as the yardstick for measuring the quality of the paper. By this metric, less is more , i.e., fewer but more significant papers serve both the research community and one's career better than more papers of less significance.

Rule 3: Pick the Right Audience

Deciding on an angle of the story to focus upon is the next hurdle to jump at the initial stage of the writing. The results from a computational study of a biological problem can often be presented to biologists, computational scientists, or both; deciding what story to tell and from what angle to pitch the main idea is important. This issue translates to choosing a target audience, as well as an appropriate journal, to cast the main messages to. This is critical for determining the organization of the paper and the level of detail of the story, so as to write the paper with the audience in mind. Indeed, writing a paper for biologists in general is different from writing for specialists in computational biology.

Rule 4: Be Logical

The foundation of “lively” writing for smooth reading is a sound and clear logic underlying the story of the paper. Although experiments may be carried out independently, the result from one experiment may form premises and/or provide supporting data for the next experiment. The experiments and results, therefore, must be presented in a logical order. In order to make the writing an easy process to follow, this logical flow should be determined before any other writing strategy or tactic is exercised. This logical order can also help you avoid discussing the same issue or presenting the same argument in multiple places in the paper, which may dilute the readers' attention.

An effective tactic to help develop a sound logical flow is to imaginatively create a set of figures and tables, which will ultimately be developed from experimental results, and order them in a logical way based on the information flow through the experiments. In other words, the figures and tables alone can tell the story without consulting additional material. If all or some of these figures and tables are included in the final manuscript, make every effort to make them self-contained (see Rule 5 below), a favorable feature for the paper to have. In addition, these figures and tables, as well as the threading logical flow, may be used to direct or organize research activities, reinforcing Rule 1.

Rule 5: Be Thorough and Make It Complete

Completeness is a cornerstone for a research paper, following Rule 2. This cornerstone needs to be set in both content and presentation. First, important and relevant aspects of a hypothesis pursued in the research should be discussed with detailed supporting data. If the page limit is an issue, focus on one or two main aspects with sufficient details in the main text and leave the rest to online supporting materials. As a reminder, be sure to keep the details of all experiments (e.g., parameters of the experiments and versions of software) for revision, post-publication correspondence, or importantly, reproducibility of the results. Second, don't simply state what results are presented in figures and tables, which makes the writing repetitive because they are self-contained (see below), but rather, interpret them with insights to the underlying story to be told (typically in the results section) and discuss their implication (typically in the discussion section).

Third, make the whole paper self-contained. Introduce an adequate amount of background and introductory material for the right audience (following Rule 3). A statistical test, e.g., hypergeometric tests for enrichment of a subset of objects, may be obvious to statisticians or computational biologists but may be foreign to others, so providing a sufficient amount of background is the key for delivery of the material. When an uncommon term is used, give a definition besides a reference to it. Fourth, try to avoid “making your readers do the arithmetic” [9] , i.e., be clear enough so that the readers don't have to make any inference from the presented data. If such results need to be discussed, make them explicit even though they may be readily derived from other data. Fifth, figures and tables are essential components of a paper, each of which must be included for a good reason; make each of them self-contained with all required information clearly specified in the legend to guide interpretation of the data presented.

Rule 6: Be Concise

This is a caveat to Rule 5 and is singled out to emphasize its importance. Being thorough is not a license to writing that is unnecessarily descriptive, repetitive, or lengthy. Rather, on the contrary, “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” [10] . Overly elaborate writing is distracting and boring and places a burden on the readers. In contrast, the delivery of a message is more rigorous if the writing is precise and concise. One excellent example is Watson and Crick's Nobel-Prize-winning paper on the DNA double helix structure [11] —it is only two pages long!

Rule 7: Be Artistic

A complete draft of a paper requires a lot of work, so it pays to go the extra mile to polish it to facilitate enjoyable reading. A paper presented as a piece of art will give referees a positive initial impression of your passion toward the research and the quality of the work, which will work in your favor in the reviewing process. Therefore, concentrate on spelling, grammar, usage, and a “lively” writing style that avoids successions of simple, boring, declarative sentences. Have an authoritative dictionary with a thesaurus and a style manual, e.g., [1] , handy and use them relentlessly. Also pay attention to small details in presentation, such as paragraph indentation, page margins, and fonts. If you are not a native speaker of the language the paper is written in, make sure to have a native speaker go over the final draft to ensure correctness and accuracy of the language used.

Rule 8: Be Your Own Judge

A complete manuscript typically requires many rounds of revision. Taking a correct attitude during revision is critical to the resolution of most problems in the writing. Be objective and honest about your work and do not exaggerate or belittle the significance of the results and the elegance of the methods developed. After working long and hard, you are an expert on the problem you studied, and you are the best referee of your own work, after all . Therefore, inspect the research and the paper in the context of the state of the art.

When revising a draft, purge yourself out of the picture and leave your passion for your work aside. To be concrete, put yourself completely in the shoes of a referee and scrutinize all the pieces—the significance of the work, the logic of the story, the correctness of the results and conclusions, the organization of the paper, and the presentation of the materials. In practice, you may put a draft aside for a day or two—try to forget about it completely—and then come back to it fresh, consider it as if it were someone else's writing, and read it through while trying to poke holes in the story and writing. In this process, extract the meaning literally from the language as written and do not try to use your own view to interpret or extrapolate from what was written. Don't be afraid to throw away pieces of your writing and start over from scratch if they do not pass this “not-yourself” test. This can be painful, but the final manuscript will be more logically sound and better organized.

Rule 9: Test the Water in Your Own Backyard

It is wise to anticipate the possible questions and critiques the referees may raise and preemptively address their concerns before submission. To do so, collect feedback and critiques from others, e.g., colleagues and collaborators. Discuss your work with them and get their opinions, suggestions, and comments. A talk at a lab meeting or a departmental seminar will also help rectify potential issues that need to be addressed. If you are a graduate student, running the paper and results through the thesis committee may be effective to iron out possible problems.

Rule 10: Build a Virtual Team of Collaborators

When a submission is rejected or poorly reviewed, don't be offended and don't take it personally. Be aware that the referees spent their time on the paper, which they might have otherwise devoted to their own research, so they are doing you a favor and helping you shape the paper to be more accessible to the targeted audience. Therefore, consider the referees as your collaborators and treat the reviews with respect. This attitude can improve the quality of your paper and research.

Read and examine the reviews objectively—the principles set in Rule 8 apply here as well. Often a criticism was raised because one of the aspects of a hypothesis was not adequately studied, or an important result from previous research was not mentioned or not consistent with yours. If a critique is about the robustness of a method used or the validity of a result, often the research needs to be redone or more data need to be collected. If you believe the referee has misunderstood a particular point, check the writing. It is often the case that improper wording or presentation misled the referee. If that's the case, revise the writing thoroughly. Don't argue without supporting data. Don't submit the paper elsewhere without additional work. This can only temporally mitigate the issue, you will not be happy with the paper in the long run, and this may hurt your reputation.

Finally, keep in mind that writing is personal, and it takes a lot of practice to find one's style. What works and what does not work vary from person to person. Undoubtedly, dedicated practice will help produce stronger papers with long-lasting impact.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Sharlee Climer, Richard Korf, and Kevin Zhang for critical reading of the manuscript.

• 1. Strunk W Jr, White EB (1999) The Elements of Style. 4th edition. New York: Longman.
• 2. Zinsser W (2006) On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction. 30th anniversary edition. New York: Harper Perennial.
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• 9. Johnson DS (2002) A theoretician's guide to the experimental analysis of algorithms. In Goldwasser MH, Johnson DS, McGeoch CC, editors. Data Structures, Near Neighbor Searches, and Methodology: Fifth and Sixth DIMACS Implementation Challenges. Providence: American Mathematical Society. pp.215–250.
• 10. Wikiquote page on Leonardo Da Vinci. Available: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci#Quotes_about_Leonardo . Accessed 13 December 2013.

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• PLoS Comput Biol
• v.10(1); 2014 Jan

Ten Simple Rules for Writing Research Papers

Weixiong zhang.

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Department of Genetics, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri, United States of America

The importance of writing well can never be overstated for a successful professional career, and the ability to write solid papers is an essential trait of a productive researcher. Writing and publishing a paper has its own life cycle; properly following a course of action and avoiding missteps can be vital to the overall success not only of a paper but of the underlying research as well. Here, we offer ten simple rules for writing and publishing research papers.

As a caveat, this essay is not about the mechanics of composing a paper, much of which has been covered elsewhere, e.g., [1] , [2] . Rather, it is about the principles and attitude that can help guide the process of writing in particular and research in general. In this regard, some of the discussion will complement, extend, and refine some advice given in early articles of this Ten Simple Rules series of PLOS Computational Biology [3] – [8] .

Rule 1: Make It a Driving Force

Never separate writing a paper from the underlying research. After all, writing and research are integral parts of the overall enterprise. Therefore, design a project with an ultimate paper firmly in mind. Include an outline of the paper in the initial project design documents to help form the research objectives, determine the logical flow of the experiments, and organize the materials and data to be used. Furthermore, use writing as a tool to reassess the overall project, reevaluate the logic of the experiments, and examine the validity of the results during the research. As a result, the overall research may need to be adjusted, the project design may be revised, new methods may be devised, and new data may be collected. The process of research and writing may be repeated if necessary.

Rule 2: Less Is More

It is often the case that more than one hypothesis or objective may be tackled in one project. It is also not uncommon that the data and results gathered for one objective can serve additional purposes. A decision on having one or more papers needs to be made, and the decision will be affected by various factors. Regardless of the validity of these factors, the overriding consideration must be the potential impact that the paper may have on the research subject and field. Therefore, the significance, completeness, and coherence of the results presented as a whole should be the principal guide for selecting the story to tell, the hypothesis to focus upon, and materials to include in the paper, as well as the yardstick for measuring the quality of the paper. By this metric, less is more , i.e., fewer but more significant papers serve both the research community and one's career better than more papers of less significance.

Rule 3: Pick the Right Audience

Deciding on an angle of the story to focus upon is the next hurdle to jump at the initial stage of the writing. The results from a computational study of a biological problem can often be presented to biologists, computational scientists, or both; deciding what story to tell and from what angle to pitch the main idea is important. This issue translates to choosing a target audience, as well as an appropriate journal, to cast the main messages to. This is critical for determining the organization of the paper and the level of detail of the story, so as to write the paper with the audience in mind. Indeed, writing a paper for biologists in general is different from writing for specialists in computational biology.

Rule 4: Be Logical

The foundation of “lively” writing for smooth reading is a sound and clear logic underlying the story of the paper. Although experiments may be carried out independently, the result from one experiment may form premises and/or provide supporting data for the next experiment. The experiments and results, therefore, must be presented in a logical order. In order to make the writing an easy process to follow, this logical flow should be determined before any other writing strategy or tactic is exercised. This logical order can also help you avoid discussing the same issue or presenting the same argument in multiple places in the paper, which may dilute the readers' attention.

An effective tactic to help develop a sound logical flow is to imaginatively create a set of figures and tables, which will ultimately be developed from experimental results, and order them in a logical way based on the information flow through the experiments. In other words, the figures and tables alone can tell the story without consulting additional material. If all or some of these figures and tables are included in the final manuscript, make every effort to make them self-contained (see Rule 5 below), a favorable feature for the paper to have. In addition, these figures and tables, as well as the threading logical flow, may be used to direct or organize research activities, reinforcing Rule 1.

Rule 5: Be Thorough and Make It Complete

Completeness is a cornerstone for a research paper, following Rule 2. This cornerstone needs to be set in both content and presentation. First, important and relevant aspects of a hypothesis pursued in the research should be discussed with detailed supporting data. If the page limit is an issue, focus on one or two main aspects with sufficient details in the main text and leave the rest to online supporting materials. As a reminder, be sure to keep the details of all experiments (e.g., parameters of the experiments and versions of software) for revision, post-publication correspondence, or importantly, reproducibility of the results. Second, don't simply state what results are presented in figures and tables, which makes the writing repetitive because they are self-contained (see below), but rather, interpret them with insights to the underlying story to be told (typically in the results section) and discuss their implication (typically in the discussion section).

Third, make the whole paper self-contained. Introduce an adequate amount of background and introductory material for the right audience (following Rule 3). A statistical test, e.g., hypergeometric tests for enrichment of a subset of objects, may be obvious to statisticians or computational biologists but may be foreign to others, so providing a sufficient amount of background is the key for delivery of the material. When an uncommon term is used, give a definition besides a reference to it. Fourth, try to avoid “making your readers do the arithmetic” [9] , i.e., be clear enough so that the readers don't have to make any inference from the presented data. If such results need to be discussed, make them explicit even though they may be readily derived from other data. Fifth, figures and tables are essential components of a paper, each of which must be included for a good reason; make each of them self-contained with all required information clearly specified in the legend to guide interpretation of the data presented.

Rule 6: Be Concise

This is a caveat to Rule 5 and is singled out to emphasize its importance. Being thorough is not a license to writing that is unnecessarily descriptive, repetitive, or lengthy. Rather, on the contrary, “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” [10] . Overly elaborate writing is distracting and boring and places a burden on the readers. In contrast, the delivery of a message is more rigorous if the writing is precise and concise. One excellent example is Watson and Crick's Nobel-Prize-winning paper on the DNA double helix structure [11] —it is only two pages long!

Rule 7: Be Artistic

A complete draft of a paper requires a lot of work, so it pays to go the extra mile to polish it to facilitate enjoyable reading. A paper presented as a piece of art will give referees a positive initial impression of your passion toward the research and the quality of the work, which will work in your favor in the reviewing process. Therefore, concentrate on spelling, grammar, usage, and a “lively” writing style that avoids successions of simple, boring, declarative sentences. Have an authoritative dictionary with a thesaurus and a style manual, e.g., [1] , handy and use them relentlessly. Also pay attention to small details in presentation, such as paragraph indentation, page margins, and fonts. If you are not a native speaker of the language the paper is written in, make sure to have a native speaker go over the final draft to ensure correctness and accuracy of the language used.

Rule 8: Be Your Own Judge

A complete manuscript typically requires many rounds of revision. Taking a correct attitude during revision is critical to the resolution of most problems in the writing. Be objective and honest about your work and do not exaggerate or belittle the significance of the results and the elegance of the methods developed. After working long and hard, you are an expert on the problem you studied, and you are the best referee of your own work, after all . Therefore, inspect the research and the paper in the context of the state of the art.

When revising a draft, purge yourself out of the picture and leave your passion for your work aside. To be concrete, put yourself completely in the shoes of a referee and scrutinize all the pieces—the significance of the work, the logic of the story, the correctness of the results and conclusions, the organization of the paper, and the presentation of the materials. In practice, you may put a draft aside for a day or two—try to forget about it completely—and then come back to it fresh, consider it as if it were someone else's writing, and read it through while trying to poke holes in the story and writing. In this process, extract the meaning literally from the language as written and do not try to use your own view to interpret or extrapolate from what was written. Don't be afraid to throw away pieces of your writing and start over from scratch if they do not pass this “not-yourself” test. This can be painful, but the final manuscript will be more logically sound and better organized.

Rule 9: Test the Water in Your Own Backyard

It is wise to anticipate the possible questions and critiques the referees may raise and preemptively address their concerns before submission. To do so, collect feedback and critiques from others, e.g., colleagues and collaborators. Discuss your work with them and get their opinions, suggestions, and comments. A talk at a lab meeting or a departmental seminar will also help rectify potential issues that need to be addressed. If you are a graduate student, running the paper and results through the thesis committee may be effective to iron out possible problems.

Rule 10: Build a Virtual Team of Collaborators

When a submission is rejected or poorly reviewed, don't be offended and don't take it personally. Be aware that the referees spent their time on the paper, which they might have otherwise devoted to their own research, so they are doing you a favor and helping you shape the paper to be more accessible to the targeted audience. Therefore, consider the referees as your collaborators and treat the reviews with respect. This attitude can improve the quality of your paper and research.

Read and examine the reviews objectively—the principles set in Rule 8 apply here as well. Often a criticism was raised because one of the aspects of a hypothesis was not adequately studied, or an important result from previous research was not mentioned or not consistent with yours. If a critique is about the robustness of a method used or the validity of a result, often the research needs to be redone or more data need to be collected. If you believe the referee has misunderstood a particular point, check the writing. It is often the case that improper wording or presentation misled the referee. If that's the case, revise the writing thoroughly. Don't argue without supporting data. Don't submit the paper elsewhere without additional work. This can only temporally mitigate the issue, you will not be happy with the paper in the long run, and this may hurt your reputation.

Finally, keep in mind that writing is personal, and it takes a lot of practice to find one's style. What works and what does not work vary from person to person. Undoubtedly, dedicated practice will help produce stronger papers with long-lasting impact.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Sharlee Climer, Richard Korf, and Kevin Zhang for critical reading of the manuscript.

Funding Statement

The author received no specific funding for this article.

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