Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Editorial
. 2018 Nov 15;14(11):e1006508.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006508. eCollection 2018 Nov.

Ten simple rules for collaboratively writing a multi-authored paper

Affiliations
Editorial

Ten simple rules for collaboratively writing a multi-authored paper

Marieke A Frassl et al. PLoS Comput Biol. .
No abstract available

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Decision chart for writing strategy.
Different writing strategies ranging from very inclusive to minimally inclusive: group writing = everyone writes on everything; subgroup writing = document is split up into expertise areas, each individual contributes to a subsection; core writing group = a subgroup of a few coauthors writes the paper; scribe writing = one person writes based on previous group discussions; principal writer = one person drafts and writes the paper (writing styles adapted from [20]). Which writing strategy you choose depends on external factors (filled, gray shapes), such as the interdisciplinarity of the study or the time pressure of the paper to be published, and affects the payback (dashed, white shapes). An increasing height of the shape indicates an increasing quantity of the decision criteria, such as the interdisciplinarity, diversity, feasibility, etc.

References

    1. Wuchty S, Jones BF, Uzzi B. The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge. Science. 2007;316:1036–1039. 10.1126/science.1136099 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Vicens Q, Bourne PE. Ten Simple Rules for a Successful Collaboration. PLoS Comput Biol. 2007;3(3):e44 10.1371/journal.pcbi.0030044 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Boland MR, Karczewski KJ, Tatonetti NP. Ten Simple Rules to Enable Multi-site Collaborations through Data Sharing. PLoS Comput Biol. 2017;13(1):e1005278 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005278 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Mensh B, Kording K. Ten simple rules for structuring papers. PLoS Comput Biol. 2017;13(9):e1005619 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005619 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Weinberger CJ, Evans JA, Allesina S. Ten Simple (Empirical) Rules for Writing Science. PLoS Comput Biol. 2015;11(4):e1004205 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004205 - DOI - PMC - PubMed

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources