The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.
James Bryce
The Journal of Clinical Epidemiology has an interesting series of writing tips online. It’s written by Daniel Kotz and Jochen W.L. Cals. Although the journal deals with clinical and patient-oriented health care research, the tips are probably useful in other (natural science) disciplines as well. It’s wont be new for anyone working (successfully) in science, but the series is a nice basic “what you need to know to write and publish” primer.
You find the “Writing Tips Series” on the journal’s website, nicely divided in topics (each one page), dealing with:
- How to get started
- Title and Abstract
- Introduction
- Methods
- Results
- Discussion
- Tables and Figures
- References
- Authorship
- Choice of Journal
- Submitting a Paper
The only issue I have with these tips is that the sources of the tips are not cited. Sure, you could assert that what they write is public knowledge in science — or rather should be public knowledge — but I still think that some tips deserve a citation.
Still, a nice collection to get a basic overview — and I love the distinction between “What you should know” and “What you should do”, and the Checklists.