How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper (Project-Centered Course)

What you will achieve: 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. What you'll need to get started: This course is designed for students who have previous experience with academic research - you should be eager to adapt our writing and publishing advice to an existing personal project. If you just finished your graduate dissertation, just began your PhD, or are at a different stage of your academic journey or career and just want to publish your work, this course is for you. *About Project-Centered Courses: Project-Centered Courses are designed to help you complete a personally meaningful real-world project, with your instructor and a community of learners with similar goals providing guidance and suggestions along the way. By actively applying new concepts as you learn, you’ll master the course content more efficiently; you’ll also get a head start on using the skills you gain to make positive changes in your life and career. When you complete the course, you’ll have a finished project that you’ll be proud to use and share.

• Understanding academia
• In this section of the MOOC, you will learn what is necessary before writing a paper: the context in which the scientist is publishing. You will learn how to know your own community, through different exemples, and then we will present you how scientific journal and publication works. We will finish with a couple of ethical values that the academic world is sharing!
• Before writing: delimiting your scientific paper
• A good paper do not loose focus throughout the entirety of its form. As such, we are going to give you a more detailed view on how to delimit your paper. We are going to lead you through your paper by taking a closer look at the paper definition which will ensure you don't loose focus. Then we will explain why the literature review is important and how to actually do it. And then we will guide you with advices as to how to find the so-what of your paper! This is important as research is all about so-what!
• Writing the paper: things you need to know
• In this part of the MOOC, you will learn how to write your paper. In a first part, we will focus on the structure of the paper, and then you will be able to see how to use bibliographical tools such as zotero. Finally you will be required to write your own abstract and to do a peer review for the abstract of the others, as in real academic life!
• After the writing: the check list
• After writing the paper comes the time of reading your paper a few times in order to get everything perfect.In this section you will learn how to remove a lot of mistakes you might have been writing. In the end, you will have to build your own checklist corresponding to your own problems you want to avoid. After this, your article can be submitted and will hopefully be accepted!!