A scientific paper has a dull structure: Title, List of Authors, Abstract, Introduction, Results, Conclusions, References are the headings of sections to be found in many papers. However exciting and new the results of your paper are, do not experiment by inventing a new, original structure that will surprise and confuse your readers.

But given this rigid structure where do you announce your results first: in the title? In the abstract? In the introduction? Or, in the results paragraph? If you wait to long your paper will become a whodunit and readers will get bored and stop reading your paper. If the clue of your paper is already in the title you might fear that many of your readers will only read your title and will then go on to read the next paper.

I am happy that my book Survival Guide for Scientists, published about a month ago, is selling very well. Today I went through the final proofs of the second edition. Corrections were only minor (some inconsistencies in italic versus roman fonts will be corrected). Up to now the marketing has only been done in the Netherlands. Shortly, our US-publisher will take care of that part of the market.

From the reactions I conclude that my expectation that the book would also be useful for non-scientists, turns out to be more than correct: lawyers, consultants and managers buy the book. And parents buy it for their university-going children. Tell me your opinion about the book.

For editors of scientific journals it is quite hard to find referees, leave alone good referees, for peer reviewing their received manuscripts. A good referee is a person that sends in a good referee report and does so in time, and responds quickly to additional requests from the editors. Why don’t peers want to review manuscripts of their colleagues?

There are a number of reasons. Professional scientists are very busy and - perhaps more importantly - they will never get public credit for their review job.

There are a couple of different opinions about the length of sentences in a scientific article. A scientific argument should be precise. It usually contains many technical terms that must be well-defined, thus should be described verbally. Descriptive phrases or sentences need to be linked somehow to the central message of the paragraph, which can be an idea, a claim, a result or a fact.

I have encountered two different guidelines for constructing paragraphs. The “survival guide for scientists” insists on short sentences. On the contrary, “academic writing for graduate students” insists on the “Flow: moving from one statement in a text to the next” and provides us with a full table of linking words and phrases that can be used for introducing clauses and phrases; it means making sentences longer.

As a junior researcher with a little experience in writing articles, I have asked a few senior scientists about the part that they think is the best to start writing a manuscript from. Some experimentalists propose to start with the graphs and their captions. For a theory article, some scientists like to start with the the main body of their calculations and then insert the words in between the formulas.