Hi.
I'm Karen McKee and this is another video tip to help you with your scientific writing.
Some students struggle to publish their thesis or dissertation research in academic journals.
In many cases, this difficulty is not because of unimportant data or poor writing.
Instead, the problem is not knowing how to convince a journal that your paper is worth
publishing.
In this video, I'm going to tell you how to do this using some specific examples from
my own published papers.
Now, chances are you work in a different field from me, but that should not be a problem.
In fact, it's advantageous because it's easier to focus on the writing and language
when you aren't distracted by the science.
Okay.
Here is what you need to do to get journal editors and reviewers to view your manuscript
favorably.
You must convince them that your paper will be of value to their readers.
To be of value, your paper must provide a solution to a problem, resolve a conflict
in the literature, challenge a prevailing paradigm or something else that changes how
the reader thinks about your topic.
It's not enough to say, I studied topic x and here's what I found.
You must say something that prompts the reader to think, I need this information and I'm
going to read this paper to find out what they have to say.
And, you must clearly articulate this benefit to the reader right at the beginning of the
paper, preferably in the first paragraph.
If you take too long to state the benefit, by writing an extensive background to the
topic, for example, the reader may lose interest before hearing why they should keep reading.
Let's look at three examples so you can see what I'm talking about.
These examples represent three ways of showing the value of your work to the reader.
Cost, benefit.
Conflict, resolution
And acceptance, challenge
In the category cost-benefit, you spell out what the benefit of your work is for the reader
and/or the cost of not having your information.
For this category, let's look at a paper about how nurse plants influence regeneration
of mangrove forests.
This paper was published in a journal called Ecological Applications.
As the name implies, this journal publishes papers that are concerned broadly with the
applications of ecological science to environmental problems.
This description told me that to get a paper accepted by this journal, I needed to clearly
articulate how our research could be applied to solving an environmental problem.
So I began explaining this in the very first sentence of the introduction.
That what we investigated was important not only to an understanding of how plant communities
are organized but the information could be used to enhance restoration of important ecosystems.
The cost of not knowing these things was implied in the next sentence.
Rapid establishment of native vegetation, especially after a large-scale disturbance
event, is important in preventing soil erosion, invasion by exotics, and other unwanted outcomes.
The remainder of the introduction described how nurse plants facilitate rapid regeneration
in greater detail and pointed out how this information can lead to better techniques
for restoration of mangrove forests.
In other words, we said our work will be valuable not only to research ecologists but to resource
managers and others involved in restoring damaged or degraded ecosystems.
Let's now look at a second way to emphasize the value of your research.
And that is to show that your research addressed or resolved a conflict in the literature.
In all fields of science, there are different schools of thought about specific topics.
Your job is to show how your research can move the field forward by resolving a debate
or by offering a new viewpoint.
For example, in this paper we studied formation of light gaps, which are important in determining
rates and patterns of forest regeneration.
We could have just said that we studied how light gaps influenced mangrove forest regeneration
but that would not be of wide interest to plant ecologists.
Instead, we pointed out a contradictory pattern in the scientific literature on this topic.
In tropical forests, small light gaps were usually ascribed to physical factors such
as wind, rain, or general senescence.
In other forested ecosystems, however, small gaps in the canopy were often formed by biological
agents such as insects or mammals such as moose or beaver.
Our work showed that the canopy gaps in the tropical forests we studied were caused by
wood-boring beetles that killed individual trees or branches.
Thus, our work showed that similar to temperate forests, light gap formation in tropical forests
could be caused by a biological agent.
By pointing this out at the beginning of the introduction, we told the reader that the
paper would shed some light on this apparent contradiction in the literature.
The third category I call acceptance-challenge in which the accepted view of a topic is challenged.
This might be a widely held view in the field or a viewpoint recently posed by another researcher.
This approach is the riskiest one to take.
Thus, it's prudent to be circumspect in making such a challenge.
In this paper, for example, we said that thousands of articles describing effects of elevated
concentrations of carbon dioxide on plant communities had led to the idea that CO2 enrichment
would promote the growth of plants with a particular type of photosynthesis, so-called
C3 plants.
The second sentence contains the challenge.
It said that most of those earlier studies had not tested this hypothesis under real
world conditions in which other factors such as nutrient availability and competition from
other plants were present.
In other words, we said here's what most people think based on previous research, but
here's why we think that may be wrong.
But we did so in a respectful way.
We politely suggested that what happened with plants grown individually under optimal conditions,
perhaps in a greenhouse, was useful information but might not accurately predict what would
happen in a more complex, natural, environmental setting.
This told the reader that we were going to provide information that might change their
minds about this topic.
The paper then went on to show how factors such as competition from other plant species
could greatly minimize a plant's response to CO2 enrichment.
So those are three ways to alert the reader that you have some information that will be
of value to them.
You want to point out or at least begin describing this value early in the introduction because
otherwise, they may decide it's not worth their time to read the rest of your paper.
Obviously, it's important that you follow through with the promised insight or the answer
to the question posed in the introduction.
But the key point here is that you need to clearly explain to the reader why they need
to read your paper.
Don't assume the editors or reviewers will know why your paper is of value to their readers.
Tell them.
And tell them as close to the beginning of your paper as possible so that you catch their
attention early.
Thanks for watching and please leave a comment if you have a question or a request.