As a researcher, publishing research papers in international academic journals is the only way to communicate with peers and gain international influence. Some domestic scientists have done experiments beautifully, but they often suffer from the inability to write papers and become a major obstacle to international communication. This article starts from the personal experience of bloggers and provides a reference for doctoral students, post-doctors, and young PIs. The article concludes with a brief summary.
My classmates in college knew that my English was not good at the time (the CET-4 test was only "good"), and my writing was especially bad. When I first arrived in the United States, I was poorly adapted to the English environment. It took five or six hours to read an article on JBC. I often did n’t understand the meaning of some of the key words, and I felt extremely stressed.
Luckily, when I was studying for a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University, I met my brother and enlightenment teacher John Desjarlais in April 1991. After listening to my distress, John told me, "Spend 45 minutes every day reading Washington Post, and you will be cruising with your written English in two years" The writing ability will be handy). This suggestion is exactly what I want-I was interested in the news! So, after scheduling the first batch of experiments every morning, I would spend an hour reading the Washington Post at around 10:00, mainly looking at the A version (News edition). At the beginning, I could only read two or three short messages or one long report in an hour. In the middle, I had to frequently look up the dictionary to see the new words. But unconsciously, my reading ability has improved significantly. In 1992, Bush and Clinton ran for president. I followed the news and often read several pages of news or four or five long-form reports in an hour. The news that arrives is told to the elder brother and elder sister vividly.
Reading directly improves my English writing ability. After reading some news, I often have the urge to write my thoughts. In the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, the Chinese swimming team achieved good results of four golds and five silvers. Major US media have accused the Chinese athletes of taking illegal drugs, but there is no evidence of testing. It is entirely based on the feelings of American athletes. This made me very angry. For the first time in my life, I wrote a letter to The Washington Post and The Baltimore Sun, commenting on the unfairness of the report. Unexpectedly, two days later, the Baltimore Sun newspaper published my letter intact in the section "Letters from Readers". Colleagues congratulated me, and I was also proud. Encouraged by this matter, I often wrote for more than three years afterwards. Some articles were published in newspapers and newspapers (most of which were submitted by Shen Shenhai). I also wrote letters on behalf of Chinese students to fight for the interests of Chinese students. Sometimes there are unexpected surprises. One day in 1995, a friend called me and told me: "The Baltimore Sun" published today has my review article! I hurried to the streets to buy 5 newspapers. Sure enough, on the penultimate page of the A version, In a 15x15 cm space, I published an article that criticized Wu Hongda that I sent to the newspaper more than a week ago and thought it would not be published.
The above is a brief description of my personal English writing process. However, scientific research papers are different from letters from readers, and have professional characteristics and even fixed formats. In 1994, for the first time, I wrote a scientific research paper completely, and it felt bad. The article I finished was difficult to read, even I didn't want to read it again; after reluctantly modifying it, I gave it to the boss Jeremy Berg. He did n’t read my article for three weeks. I could n’t help but urge him. At 9 am, Jeremy told me: See today! At 11 am, I went to his office to urge him. The secretary stopped me and said that Jeremy was processing Important matters must not be disturbed before two o'clock. I was terrified, not knowing what Jeremy was doing. At 1:30 in the afternoon, Jeremy hurried over to find me and took a stack of papers, "This is the draft. Please let me know what you think. We can aim for a Science report." (This is the first draft, you see how, we You can try "Science") I take a closer look, my God! A total of 7 pages, more than four hours Jeremy has finished writing the whole article, but the lack of Method and references. What makes me depressed is that he didn't use my first draft at all.
In fact, writing articles is expensive in one go. I also follow Jeremy's style. In October 2006, in our fierce competition at a disadvantage, there were two topics facing the danger of being scooped. I once rushed an article twice and overnight. On October 15th, writing began around 8pm, overnight, and completed a thesis in the format of "Cell" magazine at 10am the following morning, including abstract, introduction, results, discussion, after reading it carefully at 4:30 pm Complete online submission. This article was finally published in the December issue of "Nature", "Structure and Molecular Biology" (electronic version published on November 10). The other article was written on October 18th and started at 6pm overnight. The paper was completed at 8am the next morning and the submission was completed at 9:30 am. It was finally published on Cell on December 15. Of course, there is another important prerequisite for completing an article overnight. It is to be very familiar with the research field. The general idea of ​​the article has been well thought out, and all Figures have been prepared in advance. It takes 3-4 days even if these pre-work are fully devoted.
From the difficulty of writing my first research paper in 1994 to being handy and familiar, I have summarized the following experiences:
1. To write a scientific research paper, you must first develop the habit of reading English articles and strive for 30-60 minutes a day. At first, you can choose to mainly read English newspapers and English news, and gradually switch to reading professional magazines. I will write a blog post recently to introduce a set of effective ways to enhance the ability to read professional magazines.
2. The most important thing for writing scientific papers is logic. The formation of logic comes from the overall analysis of experimental data. You must first discuss a clear set of ideas, and then follow the ideas to make figures (Figures) before you can write.
3. When writing specifically, first write a framework with subheading as the main idea (Figures), and then start writing specifically. In the first draft, we should never pursue the perfection of every sentence, let alone the gorgeousness of words, but pay attention to logic flow, pay attention to the logical relationship between the preceding and following sentences, and the logical relationship between two adjacent paragraphs. When writing, try your best to be as free from outside interference as possible (turn off your mobile phone or landline), and try to get the first draft in the shortest possible time. Also note: a sentence cannot be too long.
4. Learn to draw the scoop according to the gourd. No one is born to write excellent scientific research papers, they all learned from others. Studying other people ’s articles should pay attention to the different professional fields. Some fields (including structural biology in which I am located) have its own internal writing rules. Some words in scientific research articles are fixed, such as "To investigate the mechanism of…, we performed…", "These results support the former, but not the latter, hypothesis…", "Despite recent progress, how… remains to be elucidated …" and many more. After using it twice, I gradually learned to use it flexibly. When learning from others, avoid plagiarism. In some institutions in the United States, seven consecutive English words are exactly the same as others, and in principle they are considered to be plagiarism.
5. After writing the first draft, give yourself no more than one day of rest and start revising the second draft. When revising, the logic is still the main thing, but you must think about each sentence, and consider the key sentences in the abstract and the text. Learn to use "Thesaurus" (synonym replacement) to avoid excessive repetition. The revision of the second draft is extremely critical, and it will not be greatly changed in the future.
6. The changes after the second draft mainly focus on specific words and sentences, and will not change the overall logic. Before submitting a manuscript, be sure to read it as a whole and make minor changes to individual words and sentences. Remember: academic journals generally do not reject an article because of specific grammatical errors, but they must reject an article because of logical confusion.
This method works well, and I teach it to all students and postdoctors. My first postdoctoral fellow was Chai Jijie, who joined my laboratory at Princeton University in 1999. Jijie had poor English reading and writing skills. My first suggestion to him was, "Spend half an hour every day reading English newspapers." What is commendable is that he persevered! After several years of hard work, Ji Jie has been able to write a good grant proposal in 2004. In 2006, his first independent research paper was published in "Molecular Cell", and then in " "Nature" published two papers and published more than ten papers in other top academic journals. Writing skills are starting to mature.
It is a pleasure to publish a paper, but understand that the paper is just a carrier, it is to announce your scientific research findings to colleagues, and is an important tool for communication in the scientific field. Therefore, when writing research papers, it is important to keep in mind: express the most clear meaning in the simplest terms, but must be logically rigorous! In fact, both Chinese and English papers are the same!
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