How to successfully
write a journal paper

The blank document is not where writing a journal paper actually starts. By the time you open a new file, you should already have made several decisions — about what kind of paper this is, who it's for, how it needs to be structured, and what its core argument is. Without those, no amount of sentence-level work will produce a successful manuscript.

Here are the five things to do before you write a single word of draft.

• 01
  Choose your article type

  Original research, systematic review, meta-analysis, case report, methods paper, perspective — these are not interchangeable. Each has a different structure, a different type of evidence it requires, and a different kind of argument it makes. Decide early, because the article type shapes every section. Original research papers need to demonstrate a novel finding supported by your own data. Reviews need comprehensive coverage and a clear evaluative framework. Mismatched article type and content is a common reason for desk rejection.
• 02
  Choose your target journal before you write

  The journal you're targeting should influence how you write — not just where you submit afterwards. Different journals have different readerships, different typical paper lengths, different conventions for how introductions are framed and how discussions are weighted. Writing a paper and then shopping for a journal produces work that fits nowhere perfectly. Writing for a specific journal from the start produces work that matches its readership, its scope, and its standards. Choose first. Write second.
• 03
  Read the author guidelines — all of them

  Word limits, reference formatting, structured abstract requirements, figure file formats, ethics statement requirements — these vary significantly between journals and often change. Reading the guidelines before you write saves substantial reformatting time later. Some journals also include editorial scope statements and example papers in their instructions; these give you a clearer picture of what the editors actually want to publish than the journal description alone.
• 04
  Outline your structure before drafting

  Most research papers follow an IMRAD structure — Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion — but what goes in each section is where the real work is. Write a detailed outline: what gap the introduction will establish, what the methods need to justify, what each results subsection presents, what the discussion will interpret and contextualise. A good outline reveals structural problems before they're embedded in 6,000 words of prose. An outline should take a day. Fixing a structural problem in a complete draft takes a week.
• 05
  Prepare your figures and tables first

  This is the least obvious step and the most valuable. Finalising your figures and tables before you begin drafting forces you to decide exactly what your results are and what story they tell. You'll often discover at this stage that a figure needs more data, that two tables should be one, or that the narrative you planned doesn't match the data you actually have. Working this out before drafting saves enormous time. It also reduces repetition between the results and discussion sections, which is one of the most common weaknesses in manuscript reviews.

A well-prepared manuscript takes as long to write as a poorly prepared one. But only one of them gets accepted.

None of these steps are about making the writing easier. They're about ensuring that what you write is the right paper for the right journal. Ease follows from clarity. And clarity comes from having made the foundational decisions before the drafting begins.