Writing a paper in astrophysics
Basic info
Journals
Structure
Collaborative writing
Why write papers?
● Publishing the results and the methods they are based on
is absolutely crucial for a scientist.
● C. Darwin: 'A naturalist's life would be a happy one if he
had only to observe and never to write.'
● The number and quality of publications is, in practice, the
most important aspect which decides the career of a
scientist (e.g., 'Publish or perish'.)
● Specifically for the MUNI's astrophysics PhD program, it is
required to have at least one first-author publication for
successful thesis defense.
Before starting to write
● Publications are what people see as the result
of your scientific work.
● Clarity, form, attractiveness of the paper are
very important. Think clearly what you want to
communicate. What is the main message of the
paper?
● Keep a 'lab notebook'. Keep a record of your
work as you do it.
● Start thinking about writing a paper once you
get 'final results'.
What kind of publication?
● Contents, format and style differ between:
● Regular jornal paper – presents original results,
desription of a new method, etc. (refereed)
● Letter to the editor – shorter paper that requires
rapid publication (refereed)
● Review paper – summarizes and evaluates the
results already published
● Proceedings paper – usually preliminary results,
usually short
Basic structure of a regular paper
● Most scientific papers have the same structure:
● Title, author list, addresses, key words...
● Introduction
● Methods/calculations/observations/data reduction
or mathematical derivations
● Results
● Discussion
● Conclusions
● Acknowledgements
● References
The title
● The choice of an appropriate title is very
important, as it often decides if the paper will
even be opened
● The title should be attractive and not too long
● Should reflect the general field of the paper
(e.g. should have a name of the object or object
class in it) and be as precise as possible.
● Should not be too grandiose or promise too
much. Should not use excessive jargon.
Authors & authorship
● Author -> anyone who (intellectually)
contributed to the core of the paper. Such a
person is both qualified and required to be on
an author list.
● Choosing the authors and their order can be a
delicate matter.
● Order is often decided as a progression with
delivered labor & effort, but this varies in
various fields.
Abstract
● Must be short & concise (about 5% of the
lenght of the paper).
● Condensating the paper into few senteces. 1-2
sentences on context and aims (WHY?). Short
description on what has been done (HOW?).
Main results and conclusions (WHAT?).
● Structured abstracts
● no figures, tables, references, equations and
symbols
The introduction
● Describes the background and context of your
work. Involves a short overview of the relevant
literature.
● Outlines why the present work needs to be
done. Why it is important.
● Describes the goals of your paper. If similar
papers exist, what is new in the methods and
results.
● citations...
The methods (or similar)
● Describes the instruments and data used. Can
be broken down into multiple subsections, if
needed.
● What you have done, how you have done it.
● Include dates when needed. Time & dates of
observations, software tool versions etc.
● A table or a figure can be useful for method
clarification.
● This section is crucial for paper acceptance.
The results
● Core of the paper, where the results of the
research are presented and described.
● Identify the important and new results before
writing the results section.
● More closer analysis of the results and
comparions with the literature should be left to
the discussion section.
● Figures, tables, etc.
The discussion/conclusions
● The obtained results are discussed and
compared with the previous works, put into
perspective.
● We discuss the limitations of the study, possible
sources of errors and bias and possible
improvements.
● Main conclusions of the paper must stand out!
● Not straightforward to write.
Publication process
Making the paper available to the
community
● Publication can take several months from initial
submission. In order to spread research more
quickly, scientists used to send 'pre-prints' to
one another.
● now, preprint servers are common
● for astro papers, we use arXiv/astro-ph server
● papers that appear on arxiv are more likely to
get cited than the ones that do not.
Collaborative writing
● Authorea, Overleaf, etc.
● Overleaf is a collaborative cloud-based LaTeX
editor used for writing, editing and publishing
scientific documents.
● Overleaf has various templates for many
journals...