Writing smart: Writing quality research papers

The difficulty faced (by many) in reading a large fraction of the scientific literature is not, as is generally perceived, due to the complexity of scientific concepts, but is due to these difficult-to-read documents being poorly written. Scientific documents, however, need not be difficult to read, or even to write. In the rest of this article, we attempt to provide some insight into what goes into writing well. In doing so, we rely heavily on our own experience as authors, as reviewers, and as editors, on what we have, consciously or unconsciously, learnt from others (in particular from reading well-written papers, reviews, and replies to reviews), and on the considerable literature now available on scientific writing in print and on the Internet.