E. Robert Schulman
Charlottesville, Virginia
1. Introduction
Scientific papers (e.g., Schulman
1988;
Schulman
& Fomalont 1992; Schulman,
Bregman, & Roberts 1994; Schulman
&
Bregman 1995; Schulman
1996) are an important--though poorly
understood--method
of publication. They are important because without them scientists
cannot
get money from the government or from universities. They are poorly
understood
because they are not written very well (see, for example, Schulman
1995
and selected references therein). An excellent example of the latter
phenomenon
occurs in most introductions, which are supposed to introduce the
reader
to the subject so that the paper will be comprehensible even if the
reader
has not done any work in the field.
The real purpose of introductions, of course, is
to cite your own work (e.g., Schulman
et al. 1993a), the
work of your advisor (e.g., Bregman,
Schulman, & Tomisaka 1995),
the
work of your spouse (e.g., Cox,
Schulman, & Bregman 1993), the work
of a friend from college (e.g., Taylor,
Morris, & Schulman 1993),
or
even the work of someone you've never met, as long as your name happens
to be on the paper (e.g., Richmond
et al. 1994). Note that
these
citations should not be limited to refereed journal articles (e.g.,
Collura
et
al. 1994), but should also include conference proceedings
(e.g.,
Schulman
et
al. 1993b), and other published or unpublished work (e.g.,
Schulman
1990).
At the end of the introduction you must summarize
the paper by reciting the section headings. In this paper, we discuss
scientific
research (section 2), scientific writing (section 3), scientific
publication
(section 4), and draw some conclusions (section 5).
2. Scientific Research
The purpose of science is to get paid for doing
fun stuff (Schulman
et al. 1991). Nominally, science involves discovering
something new about the Universe, but this isn't really necessary. What
is
really necessary is a grant. In order to obtain a grant, your
application
must state that the research will discover something incredibly
fundamental.
The grant agency must also believe that you are the best person to do
this
particular research, so you should cite yourself both early (Schulman
1994)
and often (Schulman
et al. 1993c). Feel free to cite other
papers
as well (e.g., Blakeslee et al. 1993; Levine
et al.
1993),
so long as you are on the author list.
Once you get the grant, your university, company,
or government agency will immediately take 30 to 70% of it so that they
can heat the building, pay for Internet connections, and purchase large
yachts.
Now it's time for the actual research. You will
quickly find out that (a) your project is not as simple as you thought
it would be and (b) you can't actually solve the problem. However --
and
this is very important -- you must publish anyway (Schulman
&
Bregman
1994).
3. Scientific Writing
You've spent years on a project and have finally
discovered that you can't solve the problem you set out to solve.
Nonetheless,
you have a responsibility to present your research to the scientific
community
(Schulman
et al. 1993d). Be aware that negative results can be just
as important as positive results, and also that if you don't publish
enough
you'll never be able to stay in science.
While writing a scientific paper, the most important
thing to remember is that the word "which" should almost never be used.
Be sure to spend at least 50% of your time (i.e., 12 hours a day)
typesetting
the paper so that all the tables look nice (Schulman
& Bregman
1992).
4. Scientific Publishing
You've written the paper, and now it's time to
submit
it to a scientific journal. The journal editor will pick the referee
most
likely to be offended by your paper, because then at least the referee
will read it and get a report back within the lifetime of the editor.
Referees
who don't care one way or the other about a paper have a tendency to
leave
manuscripts under a growing pile of paper until the floor collapses,
killing
the 27 English graduate students who share the office below (Schulman,
Cox, & Williams 1993).
Be aware that every scientific paper contains
serious
errors. If your errors are not caught before publication, you'll
eventually
have to write an erratum to the paper explaining (a) how and why you
messed
up and (b) that even though your experimental results are now totally
different,
your conclusions need not be changed. Errata can be good for your
career.
They are easy to write, and the convention is to reference them as if
they
were real papers, leading the casual reader--and perhaps also the
Science
Citation Index--to think that you've published more papers than you
really
have (Schulman
et al. 1994).
5. Conclusions
The conclusion section is very easy to write: all
you have to do is to take your abstract and change the tense from
present
to past. It's considered good form to mention at least one relevant
theory
only in the abstract and conclusion. By doing this, you don't have to
say
why your experiment does (or does not) agree with the theory, you
merely
have to state that it does (or does not).
We (meaning I) presented observations on the
scientific
publishing process which (meaning that) are important and timely in
that
unless I have more published papers soon, I will never get another job.
These observations are consistent with the theory that it is difficult
to do good science, write good scientific papers, and have enough
publications
to get future jobs.
References