Submitting papers to Aaron for review
Guidelines for writing and submitting papers
Writing papers is a key activity in science and in science education. I (Aaron) put a high value on good writing, for a number of reasons:
It is key for clearly communicating ideas and data
Compared to oral communication, written communication is (should be) more precise, thoughtful (because you can edit prior to anyone else reading it), organized, detailed, and durable
Writing allows you to organize your thoughts and identify any gaps in your understanding, unthought-through assumptions, and failures in logic
Writing (and in particular, getting feedback and re-writing) allows you to improve your cognitive and intellectual abilities
Based on this perspective, I never want to see a written document (term paper, thesis, manuscript, etc.) from someone in the lab only once; I want to have the opportunity to work with you over multiple drafts to improve both the quality of the paper itself and — far more importantly—your ability to think and write. This life choice I have made entails significant work for me, because editing and providing feedback at the level of detail I feel is appropriate is time-consuming. But it's a labour of love! With this in mind, I have a number of guidelines I would ask that you follow. Here it's broken into overall guidance, and then a checklist below which will repeat some of these points, as well as highlighting some other ones you should also attend to.
First off, given the time that it takes me to go through a paper, there are some very easy things you can do to make this process more streamlined. Keep in mind that this may be your first, or fourth, or whatever, paper but I read a lot of these every year. So one thing that helps is if you are NOT creative in your formatting, presentation, or writing style but instead follow best practices in the field. This means writing according to the APA Publication Manual, 6th Edition. Contrary to popular belief, this is not just a guide to formatting your references, but rather an exhaustive guide to writing style and practice. Whatever flaws it may have, it does provide a structure that is tailored to effective and consistent scientific communication. Coming back to "making Aaron's life easier", I will say that it is way easier for me to edit a paper if it's written following the APA template. You can easily find these templates for free by googling, and I highly recommend that you start with such a template rather than drafting something, then taking time later to reformat. What inevitably happens is you run out of time, decide editing (or writing) is more important than formatting, and submit something whose formatting makes me sad.
Another thing to know is that I love Google docs for collaborative writing. This has several advantages over Word:
The document is constantly auto-saved in the cloud, so you can never lose your paper. I have seen far too many files (including honours theses) on people's hard drives disappear unrecoverably, and this typically happens on or very close to a deadline. All hard drives fail, and always sooner than you expect.
All changes are tracked by default, so you can edit with wild abandon and go back to earlier versions if you decide you really need that brilliant idea, or accidentally deleted something.
There is only ever one version of the document. So, you will never have a situation where I edit the wrong version of a document, or something gets lost. This becomes really valuable when you have more than two people working on a project.
In "suggesting" mode any changes I make will be highlighted (like Word's Track Changes)
I can make comments and my comment history will be preserved (unless you delete them) in later drafts so I can remember what I said before.
Note that Google docs lets you export to Word (or PDF) format so you can still produce versions of the file in whatever format you need for purposes other than pleasing me.
With that in mind, the basic recommendations are:
Write your paper in Google docs, using an APA template. Google loves you so much they provide an APA template for you, so this is a no-brainer. Just start from docs.google.com and you should see "Report (APA)" as a template option.
Use paragraph styles for headings. This is one of my pet peeves - far too few people know about or use this super-handy feature. In the toolbar of a Google doc by default your text is formatted as "Normal text". But if you click on that drop-down menu, you can format any text to Heading 1, Heading 2, etc.. In the Google APAP template, these heading styles are already in APA format so you don't have to even think about "is that bold? Italic? Indented?". Another plus is that if you need to reformat your headings later (e.g., you get rejected from one journal and want to submit to another one with different formatting), you simply change the style and it will auto-apply to all instances in the file of that paragraph style.
When you receive my edits, keep editing the same file. Please don't make a new copy of the google doc for each submission - this defeats many of the benefits of this platform
Use a reference manager for all your references. This will help you format them properly later, reformat them if you need to (e.g., different journals), and ensure that you don't miss any papers you cited in the references section. I recommend Zotero because it works well, and it integrates with Google Docs better than any other reference manager I've tried.
Submission Process
Go through the checklist below
Share the paper with Aaron on Google docs, using the address neurocogitation@gmail.com
Create a Basecamp to-do, assigned to Aaron, to review your paper
In the to-do, provide a reasonable due date (3–7 days is typically reasonable, but it doesn't hurt to ask beforehand). This due date should be when you want feedback from Aaron by, not when your assignment is due (e.g., honours thesis deadline).
In the to-do, also paste the link to the editable Google doc (which you get from the Share button)
Aaron will be auto-notified by BaseCamp, so no need to also send an email.
What to Expect in Terms of Feedback
The patented Aaron Newman Soul-Crushing Wall of Comments and Feedback.
It's not actually meant to be soul-crushing. And I try to be direct, but not mean, in my feedback. But, as noted above, the goal is to make you a better writer and a better thinker. You don't improve by my patting you on the head and saying "good job" when there are things to improve. And, very likely there is much that you can improve, young padawan.
Another thing to keep in mind is that when I give you feedback, this is meant to highlight the most important things for you to work on improving for the next round. This does not guarantee that, if you do everything I suggest, you will end up with a final grade of A+ because your paper will then be perfect. It will be better, but there may still be much to go, and completely new issues might become apparent in the new draft.
Checklist before submitting a paper
is the paper in APA 6 format? Have you actually checked it against that format?
Is the paper written in Google docs?
Are you submitting via Basecamp, per the instructions above?
Did you use Paragraph styles to systematically format all styles of headers?
Are there spaces between numbers and units?
Did you spellcheck the paper?
Did you then proofread the paper to catch other errors and spellcheck fails?
Did you look for and try to eliminate passive voice in the paper?
For resubmissions, have you accepted (or rejected) all proposed changes and resolved any comments that you have addressed?
Does your introduction follow a logical progression, presenting only details relevant to motivating your study?
Does your introduction end with, first, a description of your study, and then, specific hypotheses?
By specific I mean, do you state which ERP component(s) (or other dependent measure) are of interest, what time windows you will analyze them in, and what you expect to differ between conditions (e.g., “We predict that the mean N400 amplitude in the 300-500 ms time window will be larger for semantic violations than control words.”)
is it clear why you are making these predictions, ie do you link them back to specific prior findings as well as a logical explanation of why you would extrapolate those findings to your experimental design?
For the methods and results sections, have you read previous NCIL papers (published and/or student papers) and followed the standard formats for methods and discussion, including all the details that are included in those?
Does your Discussion start with a recap of the purpose of the experiment and specific hypotheses?
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