How to avoid being boring?

Welcome to the last section of this mooc. We are now going to give you in more detail some last tips before submitting your paper. At the end of this section, you will have to build a check lists of things to remember. So pay a good attention to general advises we are going to give you. They will definitely help you and they will play a big role when you are going to ride your own tech lists. Let us discuss the mistakes to avoid before submitting the paper Here I’m going to talk to you about the content mistakes. When you are writing something you want to get people interested by the content of your article, by the science behind it, but you also want to maintain an internal coherent. So you have to make sure you answer the following questions. Do you pass the so what test? If you need a reminder, go back to sequence two, lecture one. Paper definition, know your paper. Does the problematic remain the same throughout the paper? Is the title of the paper coherent? Are the keywords adequate? Is the content of your research coherent with the aims and scopes of the journal you are targeting. The people that are going to read your article are first the chief editor, then specialized editor, then the anonymous reviewers, and finally your community. Be careful to be coherent and rigorous, so that they can follow your thinking. So, it is clear that asking someone else to read your paper once again is a good idea. He or she will give you his or her views on how to improve the paper itself, and more importantly, it can detect mistakes. Is the so what of this article clear? Is the reasoning understandable? Do we need more data/calculations to say that? Is everything coherent? This person is going to give you the first set of tips that one needs before the submission. You can also check that your article is not boring because then the peer review process will just eliminate this paper. You have to keep in mind that your writing is going to be evaluated by your peers and as such, you want to think of them when writing for the last time your paper. So it is very important to get them interested, but how can you actually do that? When talking about boring papers, I can only refer the paper from Jensen, published in 2007 in OIKOS, how to write consistently boring scientific literature. Here are the boring characteristics you want to avoid. Not being consistent during the texts and losing focus on what is important. Not being original and just copying what other people may have done in the past. Not putting enough effort in discussing what your research means in practice and in theory. Not putting illustration in your article, being too concise in the reasoning and using too much abbreviation, being too exhaustive for basic knowledge. Use these advices to evaluate your own article. Are you sure you didn’t do any of these mistakes? You can find similar guidelines promoted by the journal themselves. So look carefully on the website of the journal you want to submit something to. In order to submit the paper, you also have to write a cover letter, which is a letter to the editor describing what you did, in maximum, one page. The objective is to convince of your paper’s interest. We will not talk about it in much detail that an interview with was just published in Science and wrestles this topic. The same basic mistake can occur in this letter so make sure you write a well-crafted, interesting, and clear letter. In the reviewing process we described before, you will then have to write letters to the reviewers to answer the comments. Always be respectful toward them and mindful of their opinion, recommendation, or critiques. If they don’t understand what you wrote it is probably because it was not clear enough. But here again, if you take care of all the mistakes that we have defined earlier it should be fine. The checklist we ask you to build at the end of this mooc will assist you in this. So now you should know what mistakes you should avoid for the content itself and in another video we’re going to show you some different mistakes from form of your paper. Goodbye. See you next time.