Content, Organization, and Clarity Come First

Greetings again. I hope that all is going well for you.

As noted in my latest post, recently I spoke at a webinar. The webinar was for members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It was titled “Getting Published: Finding Collaborators, Submitting Papers, and the Review Process”.

At the webinar, the first speaker was from the National Institutes of Health. She gave advice on finding collaborators. She also introduced Collaboration and Team Science: A Field Guide. I’ve now featured this guide as a Resource of the Week and added it to the AuthorAID Resource Library.

Next came my presentation. I gave tips on preparing papers and submitting them to journals. Usually, I have somewhere between 1 hour and 1 semester to discuss this topic. But this time I had only 12 to 15 minutes! I had to be very concise.

Finally, an editor at Science described the review process that manuscripts undergo after submission to her journal.

Audience members submitted questions electronically, and we answered them near the end of the webinar. The audience seemed to consist largely of early-career researchers. One audience member requested advice for authors whose first language is not English.

In response to this request, the speaker from Science made an important point: If a paper presents excellent science and is well organized and clear, problems with English aren’t major barriers to publication; copyeditors can easily correct them.

I was glad to hear this response. As stated in AuthorAID presentations: Content, organization, and clarity come first.

Until the next post—

Barbara