In my last post, I discussed trying to learn from my mistakes from paper 1. While I am really happy with how the paper turned out eventually it took a long time (and lots of edits from my advisor!) to get it that way. Consequently, for paper 2 (forthcoming) I decided to almost entirely re-think my process.
Thinking back to the first draft of the first paper, I committed two grave sins:
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Completely forget to write up and include a major section in the text. (Yup, I didn’t write anything about completing pairwise differential expression analysis. For those curious, the section I forgot was “Comparative assessment of gene expression changes during differentiation”.
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Writing the results without context or narrative.
While 2 is more complex (and will therefore also be the subject of future posts), 1 is definitely avoidable! Consequently the first thing that I did when writing this paper was to think about the following.
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What does the previous literature say about my topic? (I focused this by deep reading into 2-3 papers and also skimming 5 or so other papers)
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How is my study different from the previous literature?
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What are the main result(s) of my study?
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What is my most interesting/unexpected/cool result?
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How do the results of my study contribute to the literature?
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What is the main message of my paper?
I had already written the answer to 2. (inadvertently) in a lab meeting presentation, so the first thing that I formally wrote for the paper was 5 section headers, which corresponded to each of my results sections. That way, I always results of the paper as a guide.
Here is a screen shot of my first round of Results headers.
