Writing and Publishing Scientific Papers

Abstract

Publications take many different forms, but types of scientific publication fall into fewer categories. I do not attempt an overall, definitive taxonomy of scientific communication types, and only restrict this to a few important distinctions. The different types of theses, connected to higher education, are ones that most scientists must get acquainted with. This is often the first type of publication they themselves will have to write. Another common written publication type is the scientific article, most commonly meaning the “proper” (primary) article. In addition, there is the short communication, review article, invited article, note, comment, letter, and so on. Journals often publish book and software reviews. Scientists also write papers for conference proceedings, reports for different organisations, book chapters and books. I will briefly survey these later, but the main intention of this book is to help the reader to write a so-called primary scientific paper (hereafter “paper”). Primary scientific papers are published by specialist journals. The three general types of these are: the “society” journals, the commercial scientific journals, and the small, specialist journals. These are similar in that all of them publish peer-reviewed, primary scientific papers. This similarity of their shared primary purpose hides significant differences