Once you have written the first draft of your research paper, it is time to start revising. The goal of revision is to turn your first draft into a coherent piece of writing that clearly communicates your message. This involves making sure the overall structure of your manuscript is sound rather than worrying about spelling and grammar (that comes later when we start editing). Revision also considers the informational content of your manuscript and the logical flow of your ideas and arguments. In this post, I describe how to revise the overall coherence, informational value, and logical flow of your paper to help you turn your first draft into a clear and coherent manuscript that is ready for editing.

The first step of revision is to make sure the overall structure of your paper is sound. To do this, check each section in turn and make sure that you have included the right information in the right section. The following checklist briefly summarizes what should be included in each section and what common mistakes you should avoid:

• Abstract: have you defined the knowledge gap/problem, research question, main findings, and implications?
• Introduction: have you introduced the topic, explained the rationale, described the current state of the knowledge, highlighted the knowledge gap/problem, and stated the research question?
• Methods: have you described all experimental procedures in sufficient detail and in a logical order? Have you avoided presenting any results?
• Results: have you presented your data in a logical order and described all your tables and figures? Have you avoided interpreting your findings?
• Discussion: have you answered your research question, supported your answer with your data, discussed how the published literature supports or refutes your findings, explained any unexpected results, discussed the strengths and limitations of your study, and emphasized the implication of your results? Have you avoided repeating background information at the start of the Discussion? Have you avoided repeating the results in detail?

It is also useful to ask yourself the following questions at this stage to make sure your research story is coherent:

• Is my research question consistent? Have I answered the same research question in the Discussion that I asked in the Introduction?
• Do my methods suitably address the research question?
• Do my results answer the research question?
• Are my conclusions supported by my data?

The next step of revision is to check that you have given the right amount of background information for your intended audience to understand your study. Think about who you are writing for and where you want to submit. Are you writing for an expert audience or a non-expert audience? Are you submitting to a niche journal or a broader journal? This will determine how general or specific your background information should be. An expert audience will not need to be told the basics and will appreciate being given more specific information straight away. In contrast, a non-expert audience will appreciate a more general introduction to give them the context they need to understand the rationale and research question.

Also check for technical terms in your paper. Will your reader understand these terms or is explanation needed? Even if you are writing for an expert audience, it is often helpful to explain field-specific terms so that you do not exclude anyone. This will broaden the reach of your paper.

The next step of revision is to check the logical flow of information. This involves:

• adding missing details
• deleting irrelevant information
• making sure paragraphs are clear with logical transitions.

Missing details

Leaving out important information is very common in the early stages of the writing process because we know all the important details and can easily fill in any missing information when reading our first draft. It often helps to get a colleague to read the paper. This should ideally be someone who is not involved in the project as they will be better able to spot any logical gaps in information and identify missing details.

Irrelevant information

Irrelevant information is also very common in first drafts because we are getting our ideas down on paper and might not always have our specific research question in mind when writing. We can check for irrelevant information at the section and paragraph level.

Let's start at the section level. First of all, check your Introduction. Is all the information your present directly related to guiding your reader from the general background information to your research question? If not, delete it. For example, if your research question is to do with the role of a transcription factor in brain development and you have an entire paragraph discussing how this transcription factor regulates heart development, consider deleting this paragraph. Yes, the information is interesting but it simply not relevant enough to be included here.

Next, check for irrelevant information in the Methods and Results sections. Are all the methods and results presented directly involved in addressing and answering the research question? If not, consider moving them to the supplementary information to avoid distracting the reader from the main focus of the paper. For example, if the main goal of the paper is to describe the phenotype of a knockout mouse model to show how a particular gene affects brain development, then it may help to move the methods and results showing how this model was generated to the supplementary information so the reader can focus on the methods and findings that directly address the research question.

Now check for irrelevant information in the Discussion. For example, have you started your Discussion by repeating background information? This can be deleted as the job of the Discussion is to answer the research question and justify this answer based on the data presented. Also check if you have referred to any published studies that are not directly relevant to your research question.

Now you can check each paragraph for irrelevant information. Consider what the main topic of each paragraph is. Then consider each sentence in turn - is it contributing to the topic being discussed? If not, delete it.

Well-structured paragraphs are essential for the logical flow of ideas and arguments. Check each of your paragraphs in turn and ask yourself the following questions:

• Does it deal with one topic? If not, consider dividing it into multiple paragraphs or delete any topics that are not relevant to the story being told.
• Does it transition well into the next paragraph? If not, try to add information to create a suitable transition.
• Does it contribute to the logical progression of the story? If not, delete it.
• Does it include a topic sentence that tells the reader what it is about? If not, consider adding one.

Following these steps will ensure that your manuscript tells a clear and coherent story. Now you are ready to move on to the editing process, which adds the finishing touches needed to make your paper a pleasure to read.

Claire Bacon is a former research scientist with professional qualifications in copyediting and medical editing. She edits scientific research papers and teaches courses on scientific writing.