// the find
jtleek/firstpaper
A short written guide by biostatistician Jeff Leek on how to write your first academic paper as a new PhD student in his lab, covering when to start writing, paper structure, and the back-and-forth editing process with an advisor. It's for first-year grad students, mostly in stats/bioinformatics, who have never gone through the process of writing and submitting a paper.
The advice is concrete and sequenced rather than generic — it tells you to build your 1-4 figures before writing a word of text, and to add citations only after the full draft is done, which is a real workflow rather than platitudes. It's honest about the parts people don't say out loud, like 'your first draft is almost never ready to submit' and the specific breakdown of abstract/intro/methods/comparisons sections for a stats methods paper. Short and skimmable at a single README, so it actually gets read instead of sitting in a drive folder.
This is a static markdown file last touched in 2016, no code, no license enforcement beyond the LICENSE file, and no mechanism for updates or community contribution beyond PRs nobody is reviewing. It's heavily specific to Jeff Leek's own lab and workflow (Overleaf, biorxiv, a named advisor relationship) so it doesn't generalize well outside biostatistics/genomics academia. There's no treatment of co-authorship conflicts, funding acknowledgments, or data/code availability statements, which are now standard requirements at most journals.