 Welcome to this presentation with simple advice on writing a scientific paper. So you've finished some research and it's time to write a paper. First of all, congratulations. Second, sorry, but you should have started a long time ago with the writing. In this presentation I'll go over the writing process, talk about storytelling in papers, the formal structure of a paper and give you some tips and tricks on how to write the individual sections. But first, a disclaimer. I have written many papers. This is my way of doing it. It works for me, but it's not the only way of doing it. With that out of the way, let's look at the writing process. I strongly recommend that you write from the start. By that I mean you should write the introduction while you're reading articles, rephrasing what they say in your own words and citing the relevant work. Similarly, you should write the methods while you're doing the work. It will double as your notebook. Write the results while you're getting them, including making nice draft figures that summarize the results in an easy way. Then make a list of results, create the final figures and use the figures to prioritize what are really the most important results in your story. You can then write a draft abstract, which will probably be useful for some posters you will submit to conferences before submitting a manuscript, and create an outline and begin to copy the text you've already written into that outline. Then go through the whole thing and rewrite it for flow. Then write a final abstract and congratulations, you're done. This approach allows you to avoid the most scary part of writing a manuscript, and that is sitting with a blank piece of paper in front of you and having to start to write. By the time you're making an outline, you already have a lot of material to copy in and you almost have a draft manuscript from the start. The next topic is storytelling. When writing a paper, it's important to be aware that chronology is irrelevant and time spent is irrelevant. Readers do not care in which order you did the work or how much time you spent on each part. As the first author who spent months on doing some work, it can be very hard to accept that it can be explained in one or two sentences. But sometimes that is the fact and then you should do it. You also want to have a red thread in your story. This can be a bit of a compromise between on one hand having a logical flow, explaining things in the order that makes the most sense, and at the same time trying to present the main result as early as possible to catch the readers. You cannot always achieve both, but when it's possible, you should do it. When writing, you also need to be aware of the formal structure of a paper. Traditionally, there are two different journal formats. One is introduction, methods, results and discussion, and the other is introduction, results, discussion and methods. You may think that this matters, but it is in fact largely irrelevant. The reason is that even if you have the methods section before the results and discussion, many readers will skip methods and therefore in either case, you have to assume that people have not read the methods and write the results and discussion so that it's still understandable to everyone. This gets us to the topic of results and discussion. There are two versions here. Some journals still insist on having two separate sections, but more and more journals allow you to have one combined results and discussion section. When allowed, I much prefer this because I believe it gives better flow when you explain the meaning of each result before moving on to the next result, rather than going through all the results first and then discussing them. Now for the individual parts of the paper. The first is the title and abstract. The title you should think of as a pitch. It should be fairly short and it should be the main selling point of the paper, the reason why people would want to read it. The abstract on the other hand has many roles. It is important for having your paper show up in search and for that reason you need to have it contain the right keywords so that search engines are going to find your paper based on the abstract. It's also important for selling the research. If the title has convinced me to read further, I'll read the abstract and based on that decide if I will read the rest of your paper. And on top of that, it should of course serve as its actual function to be an accurate, concise summary of the work presented in the paper. It is not easy to do all of this at the same time. Writing the introduction is much easier and the reason is that you can use the same template almost every single time. In the first paragraph you want to lay out the scope and the motivation for the work. The way to do that is to first talk about some broad topic that is important, explain some good things that have happened within that research topic typically recently and then identify a narrowly defined problem that is the one you're solving. After that you will give the background for the work, only the background required for the reader to be able to understand your work. This should not be a review, it's an introduction section. After that you can move into talking about related work which would typically be work that either lays the foundation for your work or served as an inspiration for how you solve the problem. The last paragraph of the introduction almost always starts with here we and then you give a quick summary of everything you actually did in this paper. In the method section you want to be concise and explain what you've done, how you've done it and not go into long discussions of why you did what you did. You want to stick to the facts and include the technical details that are important for making your work reproducible. Other things you can do that can dramatically help making your work reproducible is to share the data and share your code. This gets us to the results and discussion section. Here you really need to help the reader. You have to remember that the reader has probably not read methods, may have only skimmed the introduction and is therefore quite prone to losing the entire plot of your story. In my opinion the best way to solve that is by paragraph structure specifically by having each paragraph follow what I call the why, how, what structure. That is in each paragraph you first explain why is what you're about to talk about the next step in your analysis, how is it done and what did that show. That then leads into the next paragraph explaining why you did the next thing, how that was done and what that showed. This gives the reader direction. You always know why whatever is being talked about is now being done because it was literally the first thing you said in the same paragraph. It also summarizes the method, meaning that people don't need to have read the method section to understand what's going on and it interprets the results immediately before moving on to the next part of the story. In addition to the paragraph structure you can help the readers by having good subheadings. Here in the headings you really want to focus on the results, have the titles be what you show, not how you showed it. Finally in a paper you typically have a conclusions and or outlook section. Here you want to first give a summary of the main results yet again then explain the broader importance of your work and what future research it may lay the foundation for. However I would really try to avoid the trope of more research is needed because in research more research is always needed and if you don't say what research is needed next you are really saying nothing. That's all I have to say today about how to write a scientific paper. If you want more tips and tricks I suggest you watch this presentation next. Thanks for your attention.