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Who said research is not fun?

• Writing an scientific paper for newcomers might be harder than finding the infamous lost ark. Specially because there are so many things that noone tell us ... Every rule book will ask you to critically review the state of the art in your field. Of course, if you don't expose the weakness of previous approaches, how are you expected to have your brand new work accepted? What they never tell you is that your paper is most likely going to be reviewed by people you refer -or, in your case, criticize, if this is one of your first papers- and that they are not going to be very pleased with a detailed list of all the flaws in their work. Later on, you will learn to be ..er.. polite about these things, meaning that you'll be as vague as possible at telling what drawbacks previous works do have. Fortunatelly for us, there is this Paper writing for dummies in the amazing Improbable research magazine website (yep, those are the people behind the hilarious ig-Noble prizes too) where they state very clearly what you can expect at each stage of your paper submission. Might look crazy, but everything is true :D

• Have you ever needed to be cautious with your writing because the people whose work you are critiz--- referring in your paper will be most likely part of your reviewers? Have you ever grown bored of your own sentences because you have run out of synonyms to introduce a concept? Is language your worst enemy when you are writing a paper? Academic Phrase Bank can help you with that.