Skip to main content

Writing scientific papers

Each lab member is expected to write and submit (and hopefully publish) 1 review paper. For PsyD students, this will fulfill the “doctoral project” requirements. For PhD students, the review should provide the background and theoretical framework for your empirical “dissertation”, which you will also submit and hopefully publish.

See this paper for a discussion of the benefits of writing a review.

Note that dissertation publications generally include multiple lab members on the author list, meaning that there are generally opportunities to get some middle-author publications in addition to the 1st-author review and dissertation publications.

Types of review papers:

  • A meta-analysis is a hybrid between a review and a quantitative empirical study. 
  • Narrative or Traditional literature reviews critique and summarize a body of literature about a topic.  These reviews are very useful in gathering and synthesizing the current literature. The principle purpose of a narrative review is to provide a comprehensive overview of the topic and to highlight significant areas of research. Narrative reviews can help to identify gaps in the research and help to refine and define research questions. The review may push a certain position / agenda.
    • Hartman 2008
    • Zhang et al. 2012
    • Zhang et al. 2017
    • Lakshmi et al. 2020
    • Hartman & Patel 2020
  • A systematic review defines a framework and simply reviews all of the papers on that topic. There is typically a summary at the end that presents a global overview of the published literature and “what it means.”
    • Hartman 2009
    • Maloney et al. 2018
    • Hartman & Ross 2018
  • A chronological review is similar, but goes through the literature in the order it was published.
    • Hartman 2011

How to get started on the review paper:

  • Come up with some keywords related to your topic of interest and plug them into PubMed by themselves and combined using Boolean operators. For example:
  • Drosophila AND (pomegranate OR polyphenol OR ellagic acid) AND (traumatic brain injury OR Alzheimer’s)
      • Filter the results to only include reviews and meta-analyses, and sort by newest first
      • If there are too many results, narrow your focus. If there are too few, expand your focus.
  • Start reading some of the more interesting sounding reviews, taking note (literally) of the main ideas and collecting references of interest
  • Then go through the empirical papers referenced in the reviews and take note (literally) of the relevant ideas / findings / implications / future directions
  • Develop a narrative story with an easy-to-fill-in “template”. For example, a systemic review of the literature on every paper with data related to polyphenols and Alzheimer’s disease, organized by polyphenol class. Or a chronological review (organized by date of publication) of papers related to fruit fly models of traumatic brain injury.

“Official” template for PsyD projects (this is useful for all review papers):

  • Clinical importance of the problem / aims of review
  • Databases to be used / Key words
  • Inclusion/exclusion criteria
  • Subtopics, or how subtopics will be identified
  • Related/broader topics that can inform the lit review
  • List a few of the key investigators / key studies

Determining a journal for submission:

  • List the journals that appear in your reference list and tally the number of times each journal appears. Journals with a high representation in your reference list are a good place to start, because 1) it shows that these journals like to publish papers in this area, and 2) editors generally like to accept / publish papers that cite their journal (which ultimately increases the journal’s impact factor).
    • Go to the website for each journal and assess the following parameters:
      • Is the journal “Open Access” (meaning that there is a publication fee, typically several thousand $)? If so, is there a “non-open-access” option? If no, skip this journal.
      • Does the journal accept “unsolicited” reviews (not an issue for empirical studies)? If no, skip this journal.
      • What is the journal’s impact factor? Generally, the average for behavioral neuroscience papers is “3ish”. Much higher than this, and it will become increasingly difficult to get past the reviewers. Much lower than this means publishing in potentially sketchy journals. Try to initially aim high and then resubmit to a slightly lower tier journal if it gets rejected.
Back to top