In this episode of Wildlife By The Numbers, Grant and Matt continue their discussion on writing a scientific paper. They share with us writing the paper backwards by starting with the results, what to avoid in the discussion section, the abstract, title, and realistic number of drafts. Is 15 or 20 drafts a realistic number of drafts? Listen in and discover the answer.

Quotes from this episode:

"One of the things I see often happen in the discussion is people want to talk about things that are way outside the bounds of a particular study. So the study was designed to answer some specific question, and there's this desire usually to make the study answer questions that are kind of beyond that frame of inference."

"...he'll take a piece of the paper out and put in a new document. And that was just a huge help for me because I do get distracted by just the text on the paper and just the volume of text on the paper. So sometimes if I need to focus in on a paragraph or a section, I'll just cut that out and make a new document, and then just put it back in when I feel like I got it right."

In a future episode, they will cover choosing where to submit the paper and how to handle the review process.

Episode music: Shapeshifter by Mr Smith is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License. 

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/