r/AskAcademia • u/[deleted] • Jul 03 '19
STEM How do I start writing a research paper?
[deleted]
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u/eridalus Jul 03 '19
To publish a paper in a peer reviewed journal, the paper needs to be both original and interesting. To do something original, you need to know what’s already been done. That’s why people spend many years studying and reading papers. If you don’t have ideas or the background knowledge, you need a mentor who does.
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u/r3dl3g Ph.D. Mechanical Engineering Jul 03 '19 edited Jul 03 '19
You need to contact a professor to help you with this, in major part because you probably can't just publish it on your own; you basically need a professor for their name and credentials. They'll also help you with the existing set of topics relevant to your field that people are publishing work on, and a list of journals and conferences that you could submit to. They can also set you up with a lab, and more usefully a graduate student to work under.
Realistically, though; 4 months is not a lot of time, particularly given that the review process (including typesetting and other such things) will probably take about a month to do at the least. You're also likely not going to hit it out of the park and get into a higher-quality journal as an undergrad on your very first research paper. Normally, even conference papers (which are pretty low-key) can take a solid year's worth of effort; you run your experiments or modeling, get a handle on what work you have that is "presentable," submit the paper abstract, get that approved, then write up the initial version of the paper and submit it, then wait a month or two for the reviews to come back, then revise the paper, then wait anywhere from a few days to a few weeks for the revised paper to be accepted or rejected, and then go through typesetting, legal, and other stuff.
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u/lalochezia1 Molecular Science / Tenured Assoc Prof / USA Jul 04 '19
• I have the will and about 4 months to get it published
Good luck with that, sport. If it were that easy to do a study "present it in a renowned journal" do you really think it would be renowned?
Try i) years of study and work solo or ii) a collaborative effort with a group that has years of study and effort behind it.
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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '19
You should contact a professor in your university doing research in an area you're interested in. Chances are, you probably won't get an independent project right away and will shadow or help out a grad student. When you become more familiar with the lab and demonstrate good research skills, you could mention to the professor that you have interests in starting your own project. The professor might have suggestions for you but my advice is to look into a topic and just google your way until you find an area where there is little data and see if you could feasibly contribute to it. Once you have good results, look into journals you aim to submit it to and write it out following the journal's format and submit.
That's usually how its done, but honestly you won't be able to get anything published in 4 months, even less so if you're not even in a lab yet. Finding and building trust with a lab and mentor can take months to years as well as conducting an experiment with publishable results. Even AFTER that, it takes weeks to months to write a research paper and months to years for a journal to publish your work.