Writing For Earth Scientists - 52 Lessons In Academic Publishing

The time has come. You are an Earth scientist. You’ve spent weeks, months, years working on this project -- now is the time to pull it together for publication. You might be writing an undergraduate or graduate thesis, a research paper for a leading journal, a note for the newsletter of the local amateur scientific society, a book review or an abstract for a specialist geological conference. How do you make the transition from promising unpublished researcher to established academic author? Of course, the phrase ‘academic publishing’ covers a multitude of sins; monographs, research papers, book reviews, conference abstracts or whatever each requires a different approach. You have to decide what it is you are going to write and where to publish it. There are co-authors, supervisors of your degree, peer reviewers and editors to deal with on the way. But the only way to write like an academic is to write like an academic … where do you start? You could do much worse than start here.

Professor Stephen Donovan has been publishing on such diverse subjects as Caribbean geology, palaeontology, the history of science, ichnology and academic publishing for over 30 years. He loves research, writing and publishing. This book can be read from cover-to-cover, dipped into when an answer to a specific question is needed or both. The aim is to help all geologists to write improved papers – both better organised and more readable - and to get them published.?