The Leek group guide to writing your first paper

The @jtleek guide to writing your first academic paper https://t.co/APLrEXAS46

— Stephen Turner (@genetics_blog) September 17, 2015

I have written guides on reviewing papers, sharing data,  and writing R packages. One thing I haven’t touched on until now has been writing papers. Certainly for me, and I think for a lot of students, the hardest transition in graduate school is between taking classes and doing research.

There are several hard parts to this transition including trying to find a problem, trying to find an advisor, and having a ton of unstructured time. One of the hardest things I’ve found is knowing (a) when to start writing your first paper and (b) how to do it. So I wrote a guide for students in my group:

https://github.com/jtleek/firstpaper

On how to write your first paper. It might be useful for other folks as well so I put it up on Github. Just like with the other guides I’ve written this is a very opinionated (read: doesn’t apply to everyone) guide. I also would appreciate any feedback/pull requests people have.