Tips on how to write and publish a high-quality scientific paper fast!

1. Tips to write the first draft of
your paper in less than 1 day!
1. Decide on the topic.
2. Decide on the article type e.g. Review, Letter to the Editor, Commentary/Short Communication,
Research Article etc.
3. Write a proposed title of your manuscript (may be changed later on!).
4. Write 3-5 key-words describing your article (can be from the proposed title for your topic).
5. Search for publications using your key-words either singly or together (better matched to their
MeSH- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/) or even your “full” proposed title in PubMed
(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/) and Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com/) to
achieve 3 goals:
a. Identify 3-5 likely journals to submit to.
b. Learn how others have written and structured the topic.
c. Collect Abstracts and References of relevance to your article!
6. Make sure that you copy and paste (in a word docx etc.) the article abstracts and their
references for later review-the references should be used in EndNote, Mendeley etc.
7. Choose journals that publish free &/Or online and are open-access. You can look for Open
Access also here (https://www.sciencedirect.com/). For Health sciences :
https://www.sciencedirect.com/browse/journals-and-
books?accessType=openAccess&subject=health-sciences: you can also search using your
keywords here as well.
8. Check that the Journals are listed in Scobus (https://www.scopus.com/sources.uri) or SCI
Journal List (http://ssci.isi-database.org/) (trustworthy Journals).
9. Starting by 1 of the journals, check their author’s guidelines (how to write and structure the
article).
10. Use the headings in the author’s guidelines to write your first draft. If you have already written
your article headings and draft, change them to comply with the authors’ guidelines.
11. An article draft should be ready within one day only! The longer it takes, the less likely you are
going to publish your paper!
12. Make sure that the word processing program you are using e.g. Microsoft word, has “spell
check” activated. Adding Grammarly Add-ins (http://www.grammarly.com/office-addin)
to your word program is very important for having good English writing!
13. The introduction should be short and contains 2 facts: Background and why are you writing the
paper-the first sentence should be very catching!
14. Populating and enriching your paper: Use interesting sentences, ideas, suggestions,
recommendations, etc. from the abstracts or PDFs of similar publications (copied and pasted
into your paper: re-worded to avoid Plagiarism! AND referenced to their original authors) to
populate the various sections of your paper.
15. Proofread, request an expert or colleague to review and submit!