It is widely known that a scholar cannot edit his or her own work. Nor, often can close colleagues or others working on similar problems within the field. The human brain has a bias toward seeing regularity, order, and what it has seen before. Errors, of number, of structure, of language, are easily overlooked and their correct counterparts are substituted, without the conscious mind even being aware of what is going on underneath its perception. A careful look by someone who will not see what is not there, because of the lack of preconceptions that comes with being from outside a field or group, could save an author embarrassment and even make the difference between acceptance and rejection at a journal.
As an editor, I specialize in academic papers. There are a few fields that I favor and have a background in, but I have worked on everything from engineering to mathematics to oncology. While technical terms and field-specific expressions do require me to pause at times, guidance is usually only a short Google Scholar search away. Fundamentally, as I work, I am in search of the best way to express your meaning, in your terms. That is how I approach every manuscript that comes before me.
But perhaps having a complete manuscript seems far from you. It could be that, although you have your thesis, your idea, and your data, although you have already run your experiment or completed your research and all the material you will need is in your notes, which you have gone over many times, but you just can’t get started. While examining papers by other authors and consulting with senior colleagues will certainly help, in the end you are left alone with your own task.
Here too, an editor can provide some assistance, but this time in the imagination. Imagine you are talking with someone like an academic editor, someone who is familiar with your field but not expert in my corner of it: what would that person, if properly acquainted with the questions animating you and researchers like you, find most interesting in your work. Put this in a sentence. Now, you can use this to build your abstract, from the bottom up. If appropriate, use the structure of a traditional scientific abstract as blanks in a form that can guide you. Once the abstract is complete, you can use it to build your introduction, and proceed more easily from there, as constructing the introduction will provide you with a skeleton that it will be easy to build a full-bodied paper around (even if you have to go back later and revise the introduction and abstract you originally wrote as you move further along in your paper.
Get in touch with Patrick Findler directly: http://peerwith.expert/patrickfindler
