The goal of the “Stylish Academic Writing” professional development webinar series is to help students and trainees improve their scientific writing skills. The inaugural webinar was presented by Professor John Yates III from the Scripps Research Institute. Professor Yates is Editor-in-chief at the Journal of Proteome Research (JPR). This webinar covered different aspects of scientific writing, including Professor Yates’ personal approach to writing, how to make a perfect figure, and even how to manage disputes over authorship. In China alone, the webinar attracted nearly 3,000 online viewers even though it was aired close to midnight.
The title of Professor Yates’ presentation was "Write, Write, Write." Throughout the 45-minute presentation, Professor Yates shared several important tips including:
• Develop a daily writing habit and try to publish often
• Write manuscripts in small sections and paragraphs a little at a time
• Don’t blindly accept changes. Instead, improve your writing by reviewing the stylistic and grammatical reasons behind each edit
• Focus on the discussion section, which shows how your results advance the current understanding in the field
• When choosing a journal to submit to, aim high, but choose appropriately
• Seriously consider reviewer criticism to improve the quality of your paper
Professor Yates noted that writing is like working out in the gym. The more you do it, the stronger you get. As such, trainees should try to write often and publish everything they accomplish, no matter how small. Professor Yates discussed three pillars of academic writing: mechanics, style, and content.
With regards to mechanics and style, Professor Yates suggested that trainees read and pay attention to the writing of others. Proper grammar is essential to getting your message across and incorrect grammar can detract from your scientific content and can cause challenges to the review process. He recommends taking classes in English technical writing, using a copyeditor or software such as Grammarly, and to write frequently. He recommended “The Elements of Style” by Strunk and White as an excellent writing handbook.
Professor Yates discussed scientific content with respect to publishing in JPR. JPR prioritizes exciting, groundbreaking science, where studies are welcome from a wide swath of proteomic and metabolomic research. Publishable research requires proper statistical design for quantitative experiments. For this, he suggested reviewing a review article in JPR by Oberg and Vitek from 2009 (DOI: 10.1021/pr8010099). Studies should include enough samples and sufficient controls to properly power the experiment. Validation of biological experiments (including computational modeling) should be performed using experimental methods on independent patient or biological samples.
This session included an extended Q&A session with the audience, guided by Drs. Justyna Fert-Bober (Cedars Sinai, USA), Tiannan Guo (Westlake University, China) and Brian Searle (Ohio State University, USA). A full video recording of the session including the Q&A session is available on the HUPO Proteomics Knowledge Source website (https://pkr.hupo.org/).
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