Hello!

Academic scientific work typically culminates in a journal publication, enabling authors to share their novel findings with the community. Very often these articles list several authors, which emphasises the collaborative nature of many projects. In this regard, the scientific writing process involving several authors can be challenging to manage at times, which makes it a valuable opportunity to learn how to foster and maintain productive environments with multiple collaborators. Therefore, I would like to share some of the lessons I have acquired regarding producing manuscripts in cooperation with my colleagues.

1. Inviting relevant collaborators early

2. Provide enough time for discussion and revisions

3. Embracing the iterative process

Inviting relevant collaborators early

Generally, manuscript planning should ideally begin in parallel to the study design of experiments. It helps identifying key contributors to the project, who often appear first in the author list, as well as remaining vital elements, who provide resources for the work despite not actively engaging in the experiments. Ultimately, having clear descriptions of the contributions of each author will facilitate managing the workload and settling possible authorship conflicts.

After completing all practical work, a useful next step is to produce the first draft of the manuscript figures. It provides the first tangible example of the story we will share and helps to identify possible information gaps about the work, which must be addressed in the manuscript. In my experience, it is helpful to meet with all authors and discuss their interpretation of the story conveyed by all figure panels, which is an opportunity to see how the community would react to the work. I would also emphasise the value of welcoming contributors from diverse scientific backgrounds, which should translate to a higher sensitivity to different aspects (such as proper data visualisation, accurate labelling of images or the mathematical formality of equations).

“If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.” - Henry Ford

Provide enough time for discussion and revisions

During the manuscript drafting phase, the points discussed above should also aim to give enough time for co-authors to get familiar with the work, from a technical standpoint. The initial discussion meetings will simultaneously provide the most pristine reaction to the results from collaborators who were not actively involved in the experiments and be the first contact with a detailed walkthrough of the work. Depending on the complexity of the project, spanning these discussions over a few meetings would give co-authors enough time to digest the project and build their thoughts towards meaningful contributions in how to best showcase the results in figures and highlight it in the text. As the conversations evolve, the priority of each topic will naturally adjust, making it easier to identify what matters can be quickly settled in follow-up emails and those that require further discussion (in meetings). Indeed, another great approach to support the discussion of key points is to gather related data from the literature, which we have readily available in meetings to level the background knowledge of all participants and facilitate decision-making.

Next, when the draft of the manuscript is complete, a similar argument holds. Co-authors will have seen the story from all the figure panels and can now critically comment on most written statements. Nonetheless, as busy as everyone is, finding the time to focus deeply on the draft can be challenging, which is another reason why it is important to request feedback well in advance so that people can fit this task in their schedule. Critically, not accounting for this factor can negatively affect the first authors, which may miss out on relevant comments from others because revisions were done lightly or in a short notice.

Embracing the iterative process

Perhaps the most crucial aspect in this process is learning to accept that it can take several iterations until reaching a product that makes all authors comfortable. Indeed, accepting the final version of the manuscript is one of the three main criteria required for someone to be an author on a paper and, for this reason, managing comments and opinions to fulfil all requests is a critical skill to develop. From a practical perspective, this can imply that entire figures need to be re-plotted and adjusted with post-processing software many times, which can feel frustrating at times.

Nonetheless, it is important to identify the type of comments and distinguish between style-related or science-related topics. I believe the former are mostly related to the best practices for science communication, where we consider the types of plots, colormaps and data organisation techniques that best support the message we are trying to convey; conversely, the latter can be more worrying, as they may result from disagreements in how the data was analysed in the first place. Clearly interconnected, both topics challenge our ability to communicate and be able to support and describe that our proposed pipeline is correct or, instead, reveal gaps in our manuscript or figure panels that should be addressed. Furthermore, I think that iterating on the feedback as quickly as possible is advantageous as, often, the source of the comments will still remember the context of the issue making it easier to settle or re-iterate again towards a new solution.

From a practical standpoint, we use Office 365 in our group, which lets everyone submit their comments in the Word file, keeps them structured throughout the document, while also facilitating small discussions in each separate thread. Furthermore, by tracking changes in the text, it is very convenient to revert to previous versions if necessary.

Conclusion

Preparing manuscripts in collaborative environments can be a challenging, more so as the author list grows. Nonetheless, gathering genuine input from different scientific backgrounds can only improve the final article, with clear benefits for the authors and for the scientific community, making this strenuous task worthy. I am excited to go through these stages and understand how to leverage such stimulating discussions to better produce and communicate scientific projects.

Please feel free to share your thoughts on preparing collaborative scientific manuscripts!

Have a great day!