Anyway, I'm writing a paper right now from project data that we collected last year. It's on a kind of tight timeline (in fact it's due in 17 days). Last year I had 2 paid grad students on my project and 2 volunteer grad students who participated in the project as a research practicum. One of the paid students graduated and is now a professor elsewhere, and I'm currently employing the remaining 3. This week another new grad student asked if he could participate in my project on a volunteer basis. Hooray! I'm happy because he seems very competent and thoughtful.
So anyway, I'm writing this paper with all 3 of my current grad students and with the newly graduated professor. He's skyping into our meetings. The students are doing some analyses of the data for the paper and I've been writing a draft. I'm making all of them authors.
I decided to try to make the manuscript writing process as transparent as possible for my students. Only one of them has any experience with writing papers for publication. Dropbox has been so wonderful for this - what did we ever do without it?
There are lots of different ways to write a paper but I only know how I do it, so that's what I'm trying to share with my students. Since we're delving into a new content area for this paper, it required a decent lit review first. I read all of the relevant literature and then took notes on everything I read in one document. As I proceeded, the notes took on an organizational structure with different sub-headings that were relevant to the paper. I kept this on dropbox as I went, creating new versions as I changed it, so they could see its evolution.
When I write I usually need to start with a detailed outline. So in this case, I created an initial outline that I thought might work. Soon I figured out that it wasn't going to work, so I tried version 2, but kept the 1st version in the document so the students could see what I'd tried and rejected. I put all of the relevant notes from the lit review into my outline. Once I finished I could see it wasn't quite right, so I re-arranged things and re-organized into a 3rd version of the outline, which is what I've been using to write the paper.
Meanwhile we've been meeting to discuss this process and for me to solicit the students' input on the particular sets of results we should include. Together we decided on three specific results to go into the paper. Then I started writing the front half of the paper, saving versions as I went. Tonight one of my students remarked that it's been helpful to see how the paper has changed over the past few days, particularly the ways in which I decided to stray from the outline.
I'm having one of my students, the one who will be second author, take a crack at writing the analysis part of the methods section. I figured this would be the easiest part for her to draft because she has been taking a lead on the data analysis.
Tomorrow we meet to hammer out exactly what pieces of data we'll use in the results section for each of the three major results. I hope to create a detailed outline of that part together with them during the meeting, and then write a draft of the results over the next week. Each time I make a shift in my decision for the paper or create a new version of something, I save the old one so that the trace of the evolution of the paper is there for the students to see.
So far they say they've found this helpful. I'm not sure how helpful it truly is, but my reasoning is that at least making it all transparent for them as it's happening can provide one model of how somebody goes about framing and then writing a paper.
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