This is a tough question, one that I am answering more from the perspective of looking back than looking forward. In 2005, I applied for a 5-year renewal of my operating grant form the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. In my progress report, I listed 120 publications in the previous 6 years. My grant was cut in half, and when I inquired about the decision, I was told - among other things - that published productivity was only one of many things considered by the committee. So, writing to publish to achieve a goal - better funding, promotion, tenure, and so on - had ceased to be the critical element of academic advancement. With respect to your question, that means that writing must be driven from within even more than before. You must have a strong desire to write about your work and publish it, despite the possibility that you will not be rewarded proportionally to either the quality or quantity of your writing output. As well, the emergence of a new corporate mode of reviewing and editing, in which editors are gatekeepers of the status quo, and even one negative review is sufficient to reject the ms. without any possibility of reply or re-submission, means that you face even more negative feedback as a result of doing what you have been trained to do. It is possible that your feeling that you have little time to write is related to your feelings that the costs of writing for scientific publication are very high compared to the potential benefits, and you understand that there are other activities that seem to be valued more. And yet, you have a desire to write up your results and publish them. Paradoxically, of course, if new ideas are not published, science grinds to a halt, and does become a truly corporate enterprise in which innovation and creativity - a joie de vivre - are eliminated. 

So, I would suggest that you actually have more time to write than you think. But, you must make the courageous decision to write. The most famous writers of fiction and poetry are well-known for having wandered about writing bits of inspiration on odd scraps of paper. The best function of my iPhone is "notes" - any time I get a little buzz of insight when talking with people, I may a little note of it. 

It also helps if you read and write well and easily. The University of Toronto (like most universities in North America) has a number of options for undergraduates who need to improve their writing. Perhaps you can find something like that in your institution. Or writers' workshops. 

Finally, I would suggest that you know yourself well enough to decide if you are a collaborator or a lone wolf with respect to your work. If you write best in isolation, do that. If you write best in collaboration, do that. Find a group of people to discuss things, not necessarily to write together but to talk about ideas. Do not do this online- this is a human face-to-face activity and email doesn't satisfy the need.

Finally, try to have some fun with your work and writing. Science is too important to be taken as seriously as most academics take it. 

Again, I do not know if this helps at all, but perhaps there will be something in my rant that is useful.

Take care, do good work, and best of luck with your quest

dan

Scientific writing task but you need to scientific sources found on the opinions of others and the greater the researchers found possible to achieve the goal. So after seeing and reading comes the stage of writing. An important note is no requirement to be our writing is an absolute, but there are mistakes and missteps in the important expression of this idea. Maybe I answered some of your question.

HI,

I may suggest the following:

- Try to find a team to work with, you can be a co-author. One can find support while working with others at the different stage of the research process.

- Once you start to have publications, you will feel the reward, this will encourage you to continue

- your question here, shows that you have the enthusiasm toward research which is a significant step for you to reach your goal

There are many other ideas..but I hope the above can keep you up

good luck

Depending on my teaching load, I try to carve out a full day of time once per week to just write. I shut the door to my office, either at work or home, and only come out for lunch. I also have a very close colleague with whom I collaborate. We have similar work and writing styles. I carry a little notebook with me to jot down ideas/thoughts. 

Sometimes it helps to have the four quadrants of Covey on your mind if you are looking at your to-do-list::

1. important and urgent things to do

2. unimportant, but urgent things to do (often: deadlines of other people)

3. unimportant and non-urgent things

4. important, but non-urgent things

And then try to minimize nr 2 in favour of nr. 4 and always skip nr. 3.

Yes, Agree with Tracy, schedule your daily program with at least 2 hours for research. No one should interrupt your work, you can put a sign at the door for this issue. In addition,  and to avoid the conflict with other works, I have dedicated some of my time in the weekend for research purpose.

I understand the need to have discipline, but I am suspicious of formulas. Scientific writing, even the most prosaic, is a creative process, and that is individualistic. The following has always been a favorite of mine

The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of the writer. This is completely understood about poetry or fiction, but is too seldom realized about books of fact. At yet the impulse which drives a man to poetry will send another man into the tide pools and force him to try to report what he finds there. Why is an expedition to Tibet undertaken, or a sea bottom dredged? Why do men, sitting at the microscope, examine the calcareous plates of a sea-cucumber, and, finding a new arrangement and number, feel an exhaltation and give the new species a name, and write about it possessively? It would be good to know the impulse truly, not to be confused by the “service to science” platitudes or the other little mazes into which we entice our minds so that they will not know what we are doing. - John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1942)

Hello Helma,

My academic writing is more seasonal due to my work commitments. Like Muayyad I very much believe in working with a co-author as writing is essentially a social process that is improved by public goal setting.

I find trying to clear my desk/things to do list as much as possible first is a good idea. Once I start to get immersed in a paper I find it develops a life motivation of its own.

Being able to let go is also important - it will never be perfect and the main goal I set myself is to get a rewrite from a suitable journal.

Once I get a rewrite, provided it is fair, I really go for it as I find this is the best way to spend energy to get published and to learn how to write better.

Have a look at my brief guide: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275018577_Top_10_publication_tips.

Research Top 10 publication tips

Hi Helma. I work in tertiary education, and thus have a great deal of teaching and committee work that I also need to attend to, as well as looking after hundreds of students at a time. My academic responsibilities seem to be never-ending, yet I am also required to produce publication outputs like most other academics. I can only speak for myself, of course, but the main thing that helps me to write regularly is incorporating specific "me-time" into my daily schedule, where I actually put a sign on my door that says "writing in progress, do not disturb", close my email and social media apps, turn off my mobile, and focus on "writing only" for an hour, or even two hours on some days. At the heart of this approach is the belief that I deserve this time, and I always give myself this time at the beginning of my day. I find that if I get caught up in other things, I don't always get back to the writing. I only allow myself to write "new" words during this time too, until the point at which I have a completed draft of something. Otherwise I find that I spend too much time micro-editing what I've already written, and this is not nearly as productive over time.

Support is important for motivating your writing too, and I have joined a writing group that meets once a month to help with this. There are about 10 people in this group, and we all take turns submitting what we consider to be a penultimate piece of writing for group review and feedback. The feedback is always focused on positive and constructive support, and being in the group has opened other doors that have helped me with such things as collaborative publications, grant applications, and research ideas.

All the best with your own writing needs, and hope this is helpful in some way.

Cheers...Tony

If you're on Twitter, you might want to check out a couple of hashtags: #amwriting (general writing advice and support) and #acwri (academic writing advice and support).

Learn to 'snack' not 'binge' write (terms coined by Rowena Murray; you may find her work useful, and she's on ResearchGate). This means making effective use of small chunks of time to move your writing forward. Have a look at pomodorotechnique.com - a number of academic writers I know find this very effective. You may also want to consider setting up a 'shut up and write' group; there is lots of information online about how these work, and the #shutupandwrite hashtag on Twitter is useful too.

 Good luck!

I guard my time for writing a research paper by:

1) prioritizing my works & other research articles I need to write e.g. different work / article in different priority 1, 2, 3 etc.

2) then focus on the article that I'm writing & ignore the rest.

3) constantly remind myself each article writing has a perishable lifespan in which further delay might render me to re-collect the data / redo more literature review or I become re-invent the wheel for the same research that other researchers had published.

Buena pergunta.

Le puedo sugerir primero una agenda de las funciones principales que uno tiene en la Universidad.

procurar que en las reuniones de trabajo asistir solo dos horas por sesion de trabajo. como politica de trabajo.

procurar  trabajar en horas de la noche en mi residencia con la mas minima distraccion ya que en las oficinas de las universidades hay distracotres de toca clase.

recomiendo la lectura de GAston Bachelord, la formacion del espiritu cientifico y varias obras de Mario Bunge.

otra sugerencia es que uno recibe miles de invitaciones para asisistir tiene que darle lprioridad a que invitacion debes asisitir y a cuales no debes ir para que le quede mas tiempo

saludosd

Profesor Arturo Rivera

saludos 

Hello Helma

Everyone suffers from this problem. The way I solved this is to do the following:-

Using a 'reverse timeline' where I set the deadline and plan backwards. Put this timeline in Excel (or Microsoft project) and included the names of the supervisors, co-authors, reviewers etc., sent it to them to approve. Then printed it out and stuck it on the desk so I see it every day.

You WILL stick to the deadline as it is embarrassing to ask the reviewers to delay reviews etc and also you know you will miss the conference submission deadlines. 

I used this approach for my PhD defence, also for conference paper submission deadlines (typically in January of the year). You will probably find several deadlines that you can use to keep your writing in time. But remember you need to do a reverse timeline.

Being a project and program manager I use reverse timelines all the time especially for junior members of the project teams who have no idea about timing.

For information I also use a technique called critical chain which reduces the risk of Parkingson's  law and also student syndrome. But this is tough when it us just yourself.

Attached are the reverse timelines I created for my PhD.

FYI: Using this approach I managed to complete my PhD and write 5 research papers which were all accepted in journals, plus 3 book chapters in three years. It was tough but I did not want to slip. 

I also had to sacrifice many things to achieve this but this is not new in doing projects. Something must slip. But be focused.

One final thing... if I don't not set deadlines I waste time doing things I should not be doing. If I have really tough deadlines - I work the best and most efficient. You need to workout where along the continuum of "no deadlines" to "really tough deadlines" you are most comfortable and the most productive.

The other thing is to make your admin set-up really efficient so you spend your time thinking on the academic stuff and not the admin things. I spent 5 months working out to be really efficient (which I documented it - see attached PDF documents) and then this helped me focus.

I have a really efficient laptop environment, super fast, two 30 inch screens, NAS server, high speed internet, use reference management software, worked out the categorization approach etc. This has saved me months of time so I can focus on the good stuff.

Hope this helps you.

Robert

PS In this process of being efficient I setup a PhD forum on Strategy Program and Project Management. It took time to setup and run, but I get a lot of support from it.

One other thing is how to get the most out of your reference management software.

I use Mendeley, but also looked at EndNote and NVIVO. Mendeley is very easy to use where it lacks is the ability to allow notes to be grouped into topics across papers. NVIVO is an excellent QUAL tool and could also be very useful for literature reviews l but it has performance issues as well as a structural issue. Another benefit of NVIVO is the potential for using NVIVO is to code topics collectively within a research team so the work only needs to be done once. This would help future researchers who could take the previously coded content from many papers as a good starting point and as a consequence probably reduce the time for a thorough literature review by 50%. NVIVO works standalone and on a network server. But as I wrote V10 of NVIVO is not there yet.

So in the process of trying to really understand how get the most out of a reference management software, I created a PPT and wrote a requirements paper for NVIVO to improve their QUAL tool to be better in doing literature reviews. There is a lot of this topic of doing efficient literature reviews but this is not the place to cover it. However, I have attached both the PPT and requirements document for people who are interested to either check or understand how to go about using a reference management software. Hope perhaps someone can take it further to help others on research and not unnecessary effort in the process of getting to the findings

Dear Helma,

There is a small application "Academic Writers Block Wizard"; it is great you should download it too..

Best of them it to prioritise the paper writing. Well, devoting time is very crucial. Setting deadlines on various tasks is critical. Partnering in research is very critical, this enables one to force discussions and reviews and hence completing tasks. Try joint researches, so that motivation comes from the other parties, and automatically pushing you through sticky times.

Writing of a research paper or any sort of paper in any areas call for contemplation ,deep study a proper way of planning in a systematic line approach & last but not the least the power of intuition remain a suggestive force showing a reflection of light for the presentation .

Before preparing for publication ,apart from planning our presentation in the above line ,before initiation we have to seat quietly for above 10 to 15 mts focusing our center point of mind before giving justice to our publication .

If your department allows for study leave for faculty, please make use of it for only writing your research papers.

Best regards,

Debra

Always try to focus on the more intricate part of the research work

Best of them is to prioritise the paper writing. Devoting time to it is very crucial. Setting deadlines on various tasks is critical.

Try to avoid all trivial things