INVITED COMMENTARY
How to publish (more) effectively?

Submitted: 13 December 2005
Accepted: 13 December 2005

Corresponding author:
Prof. Cezary Watała
Department of Haemostatic
Disorders
Medical University of Lodz
Medical University Hospital No. 2
113 Zeromskiego
90-549 Lodz, Poland
E-mail: cwatala@csk.umed.lodz.pl


The bpresentation by Kenneth Dickstein titled "Hints and Tricks in Scientific Publications" is a good and brief guide for everybody interested in an effective scientific writing. It should be certainly forwarded to all younger and less experienced researchers, but also to the majority of experienced and successful science workers. It is really worth reading and thinking over.
The presentation is good, because it emphasizes all the crucial aspects of logical and reasonable scientific writing and – in turn – putatively effective publishing. The presentation touches the most important – but how seldom respected in a whole – commitments how to arrange, organize and finally polish our publication prepared for submission. It essentially consists of a set of useful hints on what to take care of and what to avoid. Importantly, it presents the reviewer's and editor's views on our submission, and states what is of crucial importance for their first impression on our work: it actually states how to increase the chance of our publishing success.
The presentation is brief but exhaustive: it is like an extract of the magnificent tutorials by Stephan Day and others on “How to write and publish a scientific paper”. It may not be considered a replacement for these books, but rather used as a synoptic manual summarizing the most important conceptual ideas of scientific writing, improving and revising. The last one, so frequently underestimated and neglected by young researchers, is often of a definitive importance for the final editorial decision on our manuscript. Our replies to the Reviewers' comments are sometimes regarded as a much better hallmark of our research experience and proficiency than the manuscript itself. Therefore, do not skimp your time when revising!
The basic difficulty in scientific writing for young researchers is to prepare an outline of a final manuscript. In fact, as they usually do not know how to cope with this problem, they simply neglect it, obviously unaware that good manuscripts are nearly always generated from good...


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