The first step is data collection.
If you want to publish a paper, you must first have something you can get. For science and engineering students, you must have data worth publishing. Therefore, collecting information is the first step to publish an academic paper (the preliminary work such as topic selection and literature research is ignored here). Generally speaking, theoretical papers can take some theoretical calculations, simulation analysis and other results as data to form a paper; Engineering papers often need experimental data, and if combined with some theoretical analysis (to increase the credibility of experimental results), it will give the article a lot of points. After reading so many documents, I found that the articles that are awesome often have profound theoretical analysis.
Collecting data is the first step, and it is also the most difficult and time-consuming step, because whether your data is beautiful or not determines the innovation and value of the paper to some extent.
In order to obtain good data, the importance of a good topic is self-evident, but what is more needed is the spirit and endurance of painstaking research. Experiments are often cruel. It is possible that 10 experiment failed 9 times before, and only the last experiment succeeded, which may completely collapse. At this time, our mentality may also collapse. Therefore, we should not be afraid of failure. Even if you fail, you should keep a steady mind, analyze the reasons for the failure, find out the solutions, and improve the experiment step by step.
Theoretical calculation and simulation analysis are sometimes more challenging than doing experiments, because they often need a deep mathematical and professional foundation, which can not be completed in one day, and often require long-term knowledge accumulation and strong learning ability. When we come into contact with a new direction, we are often not very familiar with its theoretical background. At this time, you need to read a lot of literature, especially English books. This process is painful and long.
Step 2, data processing/scientific research drawing
Data is very important, and data analysis should not be underestimated. Using appropriate data analysis methods will help us grasp the characteristics and inherent laws of data and trigger our new thinking. Because the discussion part of the paper revolves around data, the characteristics of data are richer, there are more points worth saying, and it is easier to write articles.
The graphs in this paper are not only data graphs, but also schematic diagrams. Cool sketches can add a lot of impression points to paper. I believe that reviewers will feel much better when they see a paper with a very high level of drawing. Drawing a CNS-level paper is a pleasing thing. It is said that a scholar bought a car full of cabbages to study in order to make a three-dimensional picture of a cabbage more beautiful!
Therefore, it is very important to master certain data processing/scientific research drawing ability. You can learn related software at ordinary times. There are related posts on Zhihu. You can click "Read the original" to have a look.
The third step is to write a paper.
After the data is processed, the next step is naturally to write a paper. If you have something good, you should make it beautiful, just like if you develop a good product, it is useless to sell it badly. The structure of academic papers is always the same. I believe that after reading many documents, there must always be several parts, such as abstract, introduction, result, discussion and conclusion.
When writing the first draft of a paper, don't think about the layout of the paper, just write down what you should write (word single column, or LaTeX). After the first draft is completed, the paper will be typeset according to the format requirements of the journals to be submitted. Generally speaking, journals will provide submission templates in official website, and the format can be modified as needed. In fact, the format requirements of manuscripts are often different from the final published format, which involves some simple typesetting (font size, paper structure, charts, etc. ), so you don't have to worry about typesetting at all. Because before publication, journal editors will rearrange the papers according to the requirements of publication format. In short, remember that when writing a paper, the focus is on the content, not the format.
In the process of writing a paper, English expression is very important, so in the process of reading documents, we should form the habit of accumulating excellent sentence patterns, take notes and use them immediately. The previous issues introduced some websites that are helpful for paper writing, such as "websites that can be called artifacts when writing papers!" ! If you are not confident in your English writing, you'd better ask foreigners or relevant institutions to polish it.
In the process of thesis writing, there is also a very important link, that is, the writing of reference format. I found that many people around me will be troubled by this and spend a lot of time thinking about how to typeset references. In fact, there are many excellent tools that can help us do this, such as Zotero software introduced earlier, and I will explain how to typeset references later.