This landing page is designed to bring together a collection of resources to aid anyone who is attempting to put together a compelling and concise material science research paper. The guidance provided by these materials should help to maximise the impact and reach of any research paper, whislt also giving a key insight into avoiding some of the common pitfalls of peer-reviewed research.
General Guidance:
Philip P. Rodenbough, Zhengwei Mao, Baptiste Gault
"Materialia is run by a tight group of early- and mid-career scientists who believe that, as editors, we play an important role in helping colleagues disseminate their science. We wish to thank readers and authors for the trust they have demonstrated in us and in this new journal. Over 1600 authors have contributed to nearly 300 articles published in our first year of existence. We have greatly enjoyed reading about all the excellent materials science research that authors have shared with us since we launched last year.
Because we are a relatively new journal, and because we have a broad scope, we see many different kinds and qualities of manuscripts come across our desks. This variety, as we find our footing in the materials science community, gives us a good sense of the breadth of writing practices that characterize materials science manuscripts. We hence feel that we are in a particularly good position to offer insights into the process of manuscript evaluation regarding writing. Therefore, we would like to offer a brief guide, a manifesto of sorts, for aspiring authors on how to write a strong journal article."
"Writing a scientific paper I - V"
Peter Thrower
"...After graduation I went to work at A.E.R.E. Harwell, a government laboratory where there were strict limits on what one could publish. Each paper had to be examined, and approved, by my group leader, my department head and a declassification office before it could be submitted to a scientific journal. With my educational background and these additional checks, the writing of scientific papers was always a matter for extreme care. This does not mean that I do not sometimes read my early papers with embarrassment. There were certainly errors and I cannot claim perfection, but I despair at the quality of many manuscripts I receive nowadays. Good science deserves good presentation, not the sloppy accounts I read too often. Setting aside the issue of language problems, particularly for our Asian contributors, I feel I should give some pointers and advice for writing scientific papers. I intend writing a few Editorials on this subject and hope my experience will be useful to others."
Data:
Chad M. Parish, Philip D. Edmondson
"Data visualization – that is, the graphical representation of numerical information – is foundational to the scientific enterprise. A broad literature base is available providing rules, guidelines, and heuristics for authors of scientific literature to assist in the production of scientific graphics that are readable and intuitive. However, most of the available recent publications are in the bio-, psycho-, or climate sciences literature. In this paper, we address this deficiency and provide data visualization heuristics tuned to the specific needs of the physical sciences, and particularly materials sciences, community. We enumerate six general rules and provide examples of bad and improved data graphics, and provide source code to illustrate the generation of the improved figures. The six rules we enumerate are: Generate figures programmatically; Multivariate data calls for multivariate representation; Showing the data beats mean?±?standard deviation; Choose colormaps that match the nature of the data; Use small multiples; and Don't use vendor exports naïvely.
•Data visualization is central to the scientific enterprise, but published papers' visualizations are often unclear.
•We suggest six heuristic rules for improving visualization in the physical, and particularly materials, sciences.
•We provide discussions of past work in the bio-, psycho-, and earth sciences literature.
•We suggest some best practices for visualization."