The text you are reading right now, the Writing Guide for Scientists (from now on: Writing Guide), lays out a set of fundamental rules regarding writing scientific texts.

This “writing” is interpreted in a broad way. The rules include advise on submission strategies, on how to deal with editors and referees, on web posting, and advise on many more aspects of producing scientific articles.

This tutorial in itself is not a scientific text, and therefore the principles presented here hardly apply to the text itself.

The Writing Guide is part of the Survival Guide for Scientists (from now on the Survival Guide). Occasionally there might be general referrals in the Writing Guide to other parts of the Survival Guide. However, the Writing Guide is supposed to be self-contained. For completeness we present here the names of all the guides that together constitute the Survival Guide for Scientists:

• – Presentation Guide for Scientists, or short: Presentation Guide; as an addendum to the Presentation Guide we have published the Example Guide

• – Email Guide for Scientists, or short: Email Guide

• – Writing Guide for Scientists, or short: Writing Guide

• – Survival Guide for Junior Scientists, or short: Junior Guide

• – Survival Guide for Senior Scientists, or short: Senior Guide

Target group

The target group I had originally in mind was physics undergraduate and graduate students, and physics postdocs. From experience I have discovered that senior physicists could also profit from studying the set of instructions laid out in the Writing Guide. (Just check a recent article in an international physics journal to appreciate this argument: quite a number of my rules are violated in these papers.)

The text is very likely also beneficial for mathematicians and for workers in other natural science disciplines, like chemistry and astronomy. The content is highly modular. Researchers in other fields can easily skip parts they consider too closely related to physics, or which they deem irrelevant for other reasons.

The number of cross-links in the guide is kept to a minimum. Each item can be studied on its own.

Goal of your paper

If you do not agree with the goals I will present in the following list, there is no need for you to continue to study the Wring Guide.