Advice on Reading and Writing Research Papers

Writing advice

Because writing is so important for academic success, and yet also so difficult, many people have provided suggestions of how to write research papers. Here is a collection of some of the documents I have found that provide advice on how to write, including some of my own. If you have some you would like me to include, please send me the link!

Reading papers

Learning how to read papers critically is part of being a strong student, both because you'll be participating in journal clubs and also asked on occasion to review papers for conferences and journals. Learning to read papers critically is also key to becoming a strong researcher, because you will be able to get insights and intuition from your reading if you are careful enough. Also, if you don't read carefully enough, you might do something that turns out to have already been done before -- thus wasting what may be months or years of your life. I've put together a document on learning how to read and critique papers, here.

Research projects

The first document is for students working with me and using either simulated or biological data to explore the accuracy of phylogeny estimation or alignment estimation methods. These First projects in the Warnow Lab are just a start; I'll be adding to them.