The amount of published papers per year has increased. In the last year, the United states alone have published around 600k new papers from all academic disciplines. But for the newbies, the principles of writing a paper by it's own are not very clear enough so it make sense to give some advice.
The basic idea is that a high quality paper can also be created, if many low quality were written before. So the question is how to create lots of low quality paper to get the amount of experience which is needed to write the next nobel price winning paper? For the beginning, a paper is a collection of blog posts. The author has to write some new blog posts, for example 20 of them about the same topic. The content is structured hierarchical and is added with literature references. For doing so the Lyx document software is a great choice, because it is able to generate high quality PDF documents easily.
Before the document is uploaded to a repository, a proof reading is recommended. For the first paper, a proof reading plus the creation of quality figures can be ignored because this will safe a lot of time. But if the author has more experienced it will get a higher priority. Creating an academic paper and creating some blog posts is the same. The language style and the subject are very similar. The difference is, that blog posts are written about lighter topics which are read by the mainstream, while an academic paper consists of specialized knowledge which needs a larger amount of text. The main reason why so many papers are written each year, is because a paper is only a short text. In contrast to a book which contains of 500 pages, the average paper has only 8 pages. A longer paper contains of 20 pages. Even a single author is able to write such content.
The understanding of most newbie authors is, that an academic paper should provide new information for documenting the latest research. This is true for top authors who are writing excellent papers. A newbie without any experience will write in his first paper for sure not groundbreaking information. It make sense, to see the first writing attempts as an hello world example, similar to creating the first Python program. The idea is, to become familiar with software tools and test out if the resulting pdf document can be downloaded with the browser. It make sense to reduce the own expectations. Writing a bad paper is better than writing no paper at all.
Peer review
The topic of peer review was ignored in the given explanation. Peer review is equal to a conflicting pipeline between different social roles with an academic background. Peer review is very similar to the inner working of a helpdesk: What exactly the stakeholders are discussing is a bit complicated to explain. But in most cases, they are not able to agree towards the same subject and they starting to argue about it. Arguing means, that the result is disappointing for all of them. This is equal to a loose-loose situation.
Bibliographic references
On the first look, an academic paper can be written with any wordprocessing tool. In the easiest case a normal texteditor which is able to wrap words and saves a file to the harddrive is a reasonable choice. The reason why a more elaborated software tool like Lyx version 2.3.3 from Matthias Ettrich et. al. make sense is because an academic consists of bibliographic references and maintaining them can become complicated. With the Lyx tool, it's pretty easy to include such a reference. At first, the bibtex information is needed which is put at the end of the bibtex-file, then the label can be inserted into Lyx and the formatting is done by the software without further intervention. In general, The overall procedure takes around 30 seconds. In contrast to manual formatting of the information this is a great improvement.
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