Codifying Systematic Manuscript Preparation Checklists as a Training and Productivity Resource for Research Students

Abstract

This papers aims to provide research students with a tool to make explicit and tangible the steps needed to efficiently produce a high-quality, polished research manuscript. The tool is implemented as a set of checklist resources to be completed by the research student at various stages of manuscript production. Fundamentally, humans are forgetful and are typically poor at consistently executing multi-part procedures in a systematic way. The simple technology of checklists overcome this weakness of human cognition. The checklists themselves function as a learning re-enforcement aide, ensuring that students methodically and repeatedly work through the prescribed workflow for manuscript production and proofreading. Interactive pdf documents were chosen as a suitable educational technology to implement these checklist resources. Such pdf documents contain fillable boxes that can be completed and saved by the user, avoiding the need to print, scan or manually edit such forms. Embedding quality control and proof-reading feedback in such digital documents promotes good record keeping and captures the progression of a manuscript though its different stages of drafting.