HOW TO WRITE AND PUBLISH A SCIENTIFIC PAPER

PRESENTATION:
In this project-based course, you will outline a complete scientific paper, choose an appropriate journal to which you'll submit the finished paper for publication, and prepare a checklist that will allow you to independently judge whether your paper is ready to submit.

How to write an article and publish it in Nature or Science? The MOOC in English "How to write a scientific paper", conceived by six PhD candidates from École Polytechnique, which opened on February 29th, 2016, on the American platform Coursera, deals with this exact issue.

To help graduate and PhD students who want to see their work published, PhD candidates designed an online class focusing on the writing and the publication of a scientific paper. To do so, Mattias Mano, one of the PhD candidates, managed the pedagogical team constituted of Héloïse Berkowitz, Mathias Guérineau, Arnaud Jaoul, Haruki Sawamura and Alexandre Viard. Mathis Plapp, senior scientist at CNRS, supervised the scientific content.

The MOOC is composed of four sections. The first one focuses on the context and the functioning of scientific journals. In the second part, the class provides advices on how to frame a research project. In the third section, the course describes the structure of an article and the use of concrete bibliographical tools such as Zotero. Finally, students will learn how to build a tool, the check list that they have to use before sending their article to a journal.

The MOOC is taught in English, available on Coursera since February 29th, 2016.

COURSE SYLLABUS

Week 1: Understanding academia

1.0 Why creating such a MOOC? Who is it for?
1.1 Why is publishing important?
1.2 "KYC": Know Your Community
1.3 How journals work: the review process
1.4 Presentation of scientific journals
1.5 Ethical Guidelines


Week 2: Before writing: delimiting your scientific paper

2.1 Paper definition "KYP', Know Your Paper
2.2 How to: the literature review 1/2: find a good literature review
2.3 How to: the literature review 2/2: construction of your own literature review
2.4 How to: the research design
2.5 How to: the gap
2. Additional class: Zotero


Week 3: Writing the paper: things you need to know

3.1 The structure of an academic paper
3.2 On writing an academic paper, preliminary advice
3.3 How to: the bibliography
3.4 How to : the abstract
3. Additional content


Week 4: After the writing: the check list

4.1 How to avoid being boring?
4.2 The main mistakes to look for: format
4. Two sides of a same coin
4.3 Constructing your checklist