Storytelling for Science

Let’s begin with the end. Most scientific papers do. Placed at the beginning of a research article, the abstract is the last piece to be written. It is composed of ‘a few sentences that give the main idea in an article or a scientific paper’. First impressions are crucial in scientific publishing, and this short text has many jobs. 🥸 It must be a self-contained summary of the research paper. 🔉 It should accurately and clearly present the most important results. 🤔 While encouraging researchers to read on. It would help if some SEO-friendly keywords are sprinkled over, while maintaining coherent flow… and avoiding jargon, acronyms, abbreviations, footnotes… This may seem very simple to most people. To most first year graduate students, deeply involved in their research field, when minute details make or break publications and careers, and when statistically significant differences are what you live for… being simple is hard. So, for all your studies, allow readers to 👀 S...

Scientific keywords may be messy, but to save us there are MeSH... 😜 Make your paper frontpage news!  The scientific paper is the most publicly scrutinised and main academic outcome of a study. It takes a while to get right, a long time to draft, and years to gather data.  After all that, it's sometimes difficult to answer: What did you set out to discover? How did you do it? What did you actually find? If there is are a couple of scientific terms that keep popping up in the answers to these questions, then they are your keywords. These are commonly used, yet specific terms. Now, we should assess how relevant these are to your own work. MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) is a thesaurus used for indexing, cataloging, and searching of biomedical and health-related information. It is continually updated, controlled, and hierarchical. MeSH on Demand allows you to upload a text and have it automatically processed so that MeSH terms will be highlighted and linked terms that are broa...

We all buy books by the cover. Image by geralt. The title indexes the paper in online databases, so it has to be discoverable. Use keywords and make the title stand out. How do we do that? Well… Keep it concise and informative There are lots of good titles that are concise but vague ✑ On the Origin of Species ; Others are long but informative ✑ On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type .   Consider your audience There are lots of good titles that are great for capturing attention for a dissemination book ✑ On the Origin of Species ; Others are used in articles for learned audiences ✑ On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type . Now, what these titles ooze in old school appeal, they lack for in SEO (Search Engine Optimization, for the uninitiated…) We are different from the public in the 1860s that read those texts. So, dear reader, your title must also… Entice the reader Offer solutions to a problem. Answer your own ...

  ... for this stage of the project, at least. All the knowledge and lessons have been garnered and will have their moment. But sheer joy right now 😁