I haven’t only been cleaning data this fall, though. Since I’m working with the same supervisors and in the same general geographical study area, the line between my current project and the finished master’s project has become a little bit blurred. As part of my work, I have therefore also been allowed to edit my master’s thesis into a publishable scientific article.
In academic research, everything is about getting published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, especially in the natural sciences. Since the master’s program that I did is a research oriented program including a one year thesis project, we were recommended to write our thesis in article format. This is much shorter (about 10 pages of text) than what a more conventional master’s level monograph-type thesis would be (20 pages and beyond). We’re recommended to do this, in order to make the process of publishing easier once the thesis had been approved. So I wasn’t expecting there to be that much editing once I had submitted the thesis and my grading committee passed it with flying colors.
Boy was I wrong. First, the Introduction, Discussion and Conclusions sections all had do be completely rewritten. It is incredibly important how your research is framed. You can do a study on anything, as long as you manage to put it in a relevant context and explain how your work is filling a research gap and/or could become useful for society. I already had the basic idea of how to argue for this in the thesis, but for the article I quickly realized that it was even more important to think through the order of each sentence, even weigh each word, to make sure I managed to fully explain my point without any superfluous words.
Also the Methods and Materials section had to be heavily edited. My thesis project consisted to a large part of developing a method, and therefore, a large portion of the thesis text was dedicated to describing this new method. I had worked a lot on turning my very iterative and messy method development process into an intelligible text, but now I realized I would have to cut it down by at least half. Luckily, I had help. Hanna, the PhD student whose work I built my conceptual framework on and whose data I partially used for training, has basically written the whole article manuscript together with me, and my supervisors have both read and commented different versions. This manuscript will have gone through many filters before it is done.
This is a screenshot of what the manuscript looked like after a round of edits and comments. Each color represents a different person involved in the editing process. Barely any of my original text is left. That sometimes makes me think it isn’t mine anymore, that maybe I don’t deserve any credit for it – and then I remember I spent a year producing the actual results that the article is communicating, and I feel a bit better.
I am fascinated. The extent of literary craftmanship needed to produce a scientific article goes way beyond what I ever could have imagined. I spent most of my teens practicing to become an author, and I even have a manuscript for a novel, written when I was nineteen, stored deep in my hard drive somewhere. I’ve spent hours and hours studying, discussing and trying to create beautiful language. I thought I knew how to write. I thought, the requirements for literary precision and elegance when writing scientific texts is child’s play compared to the harsh world of fiction. I thought I wouldn’t be allowed to nurture the love for words that I harbor in the career path that I’ve now chosen for myself.
Turns out, I’m merely a novice when it comes to writing. There is a particular kind of meticulousness that comes with science. Writing it, it’s like you have to distill your thoughts and arguments to their absolute core. No room for fuzziness, as with prose. Good scientific writing has the same kind of spot-on quality as poetry – most readers just don’t notice it as intuitively. Poetry describes feelings, and when it’s right you feel it in your gut. Physically. Science writing speaks to our minds. We look for it to make sense, but the magic of a perfectly formulated sentence rarely get through to that place behind the lungs. That doesn’t mean the elegance isn’t there. I’m excited for this next, unexpected part of my journey as a writer.
My article manuscript is in its last rounds of edits. If all goes well, we’ll be able to send it in for review in the end of January. And then starts the whole peer-reviewing process (which I hear can be a whole other kind of nightmare). We’ll see if 2016 is the year that I get my first scientific publication.
Katja Malmborg 