The Scientific Paper Seminar

The Scientific Paper Seminar is a writing workshop for professional scientists that teaches the skills to produce research papers of the highest quality for the world's top journals. Participants will learn the writing techniques necessary to best construct and explain their ideas and the editing skills to refine and polish their work. The course covers how top journals handle submissions and offers tips for dealing with editors at these publications. Participants should leave the workshop with a reasonably detailed outline of a scientific paper suitable for a journal of their choice.

Instructors:

Mark Buchanan is a physicist and science writer based in Europe. A former editor with the international science journal Nature and also New Scientist, he is the author of three books and numerous articles exploring the ideas of modern physics, with an emphasis on efforts to use novel concepts from physics to understand patterns and dynamics elsewhere, especially in biology or the social sciences. He writes occasionally for the New York Times, and has a monthly column in the journal Nature Physics. 

Justin Mullins is a consultant editor at New Scientist where he has covered everything from Chernobyl to the science of flatulence. He was New Scientist's San Francisco bureau chief during the dotcom boom and later its Boston Editor and Technology Editor. He has taught science writing in various places including the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

Structure

The course includes the following elements:

• Types of scientific paper and their structure
• The structure of effective sentences
• The purpose and structure of paragraphs
• Creating logical arguments
• The process of self-editing
• Graphs, tables and figures
• Exercises with feedback