As a scientist, you should always look forward to the chance to publish your results. Perhaps this is the first time for you to write a paper, and you don't know what to do and what to expect. Or perhaps this is already your second or third one, and you dread this moment since you remember the preparation of your first paper as an eternally slow, painfully laborious, and altogether frustrating process. Or perhaps your writing simply didn't make it:

In either case, this tutorial is for you. Let us first assure you that writing a publication is in fact a handicraft you can learn rather than a form of art you cannot possibly hope to acquire. We will show you, step by step, how to prepare a manuscript which will spare you the humiliating demonstration depicted above.

Our opinions on the preparation of a publication are largely congruent with those expressed in the essay "Writing a paper" by George M. Whitesides [GMW, Adv. Mater. 16, 1375 (2204)]. We literally quote this essay whenever it seems appropriate. Reading this short essay in addition to the present tutorial (which leans more to the technical side) is highly recommended.

Why we publish

"Papers are a central part of research. If your research does not generate papers, it might just as well not have been done. 'Interesting and unpublished' is equivalent to 'non-existent'. (GMW)"

Why you should learn how to publish

(even if you like the lab better)

For two very practical reasons:

(i) At the end of your education here, you will most likely apply for a new position in another lab. Usually, your prospective employers will then ask your supervisor for an assessment of your performance. At that moment, you will deeply regret all your sloppily prepared and poorly written manuscripts.

(ii) Whether you aspire a career in academia or in industry: producing reports, proposals and presentations will be an essential part of you job. In fact, it is hard to imagine any conceivable position for a physicist holding a PhD which would not require a constant flow of consistent reports, convincing proposals and coherent presentations.

A fool with a tool is still a fool

All trades have their tools. We will show you the ones we favor for tasks such as literature search, reference management, data analysis, and the preparation of graphs, figures and the actual text of the manuscript. Prior to doing so, let us remind you of one thing: these are not the humanities, and it is not cool for a physicist or engineer to be computer illiterate. Regardless of your subject, you depend on and interact with a computer for literally every single aspect of your work. Mastering these tools and attaining a general proficiency in handling modern media is essential for being able to prepare a publication—and, in fact, to conduct your research—in an efficient and pain-free manner.

Be organized

Don't wait for a publication to jump into your face. A desktop wiki such as zim can help you to collect interesting results when they come along and to organize your ideas efficiently. Put in notes, screenshots, links to documents and webpages, plots and equations; create categories and subcategories. Once a particular idea seems to mature, create a project folder on your hard disk where you collect all experimental data, all figures and texts, and all references important for this particular project. Continue to use this project folder when you decide to actually publish your idea. Put in everything of relevance for the publication, such as the raw data, the plots and images derived from them, the text of the manuscript, the correspondence with editors and referees, the pageproofs, etc.

Better safe than sorry

Be sure to backup this project folder with all your valuable data and texts on a regular (at least daily!) basis. Remember that your home directory on our file server is part of an enterprise backup solution (supervised and executed by our neighbor institute). It's thus an excellent idea to synchronize your local storage with your home directory, and to automate this synchronization.

How to start: the outline

Do you still believe in your idea? Well, then let's prepare for publishing it. To start, create an outline representing your idea as explained in detail in the Step-by-Step Guide.