Is your brain hungry for comfort food? Feed it a template!
Let me tell you about Carl Linnaeus. Linnaeus was a Swedish naturalist who lived in the 16th century and spent most of his life classifying and organizing natures’ creatures in groups according to certain criteria but mainly their form and shape. Linnaeus’ pioneer work was a milestone toward a classification system of the species later developed by Ernest Mayr that considers the organism’s behavior, geographical location, reproductive attributes, genetic data, ecology, and physical appearance. It was the beginning of a dream that one day we would be inhabiting a neatly organized living world that we recognize, nourish, and hopefully preserve.
Marie Kondo is a professional of tidying who became a celebrity after publishing her first books that were followed by Netflix Tidying Up With Marie Kondo. Marie Kondo teaches us the best way to organize our drawers and have all our shirts classified by color, forming a perfect rainbow that amazes us every time we need to pick something new to wear. But the real promise behind Marie Kondo’s lessons is that we can have control of the space we live in. A space where nothing is lost or misplaced and where we recognize each piece we own, neatly organized by certain criteria, but mainly color, shape, size, and function.
The works of Linnaeus and Marie Kondo have very different purposes. But the truth is that both bring up in us something that is very primitive, and which has been crucial throughout our evolutionary path and has greatly contributed for our survival as a species: the need to recognize, organize and classify all elements found in our surroundings. By doing this we gain a sense of control and security, that, in the case of Marie Kondo’s, is translated into satisfaction and well-being. And by recognizing, organizing, and classifying stuff, be them shoes, shirts, birds, or flies, we create patterns. Oh boy, we do love patterns! They work as comfort food for the brain. With patterns there are no surprises, no challenges, and all our expectations are fulfilled.
And that explains why we like templates so much! Templates are born from patterns. The right template allows us to accomplish more with little effort, and in less time that it would take us otherwise. Thus, when it comes to writing a scientific paper for peer review in a scientific journal, a task considered as daunting, complex, time-consuming, and virtually impossible by some, I’m a big fan of working with a template.
Some people may say that templates kill creativity and in the case of scientific papers it may mute an author’s own voice. I disagree. A template is just a tool that can still be adapted and modified to one’s own needs and style. In fact, the scientific paper as we know today already follows a template that splits the paper in sections; Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion. This is known as the IMRaD format and has been used for more than 200 years by scientists in all fields. The template I developed goes way beyond the IMRaD format and is the product of many hours analyzing thousands of papers in the biological and biomedical fields available in PubMed and lots of research into linguistic and genre discourse analysis. The template has helped many early-career scientists craft the narrative of their papers.
The adoption of a template is just a starting point that may increase scientific transparency, improve science communication, and accelerate the production and sharing of scientific findings. And, just like any other comfort food, adopting a template to accomplish a big task, such as writing a scientific paper, feels good! Would you like to try?
