This is the Bitesize Bio writers guide which sets out the voice that all our content should be written in. It communicates our personality and values in a single voice.

Why Bitesize Bio Exists

While theoretical knowledge is an essential foundation for every researcher, most of the vital know-how required to navigate the craft and career of bioscience research is learned through hard-won, on-the-job experience: either your own, or passed on to you by a mentor.

The aim of Bitesize Bio is to assist current and future bioscientists by creating a place where the experience-based wisdom, advice, tips, and insight from hundreds of scientists are pooled together to create a resource that every bioscientist – present and future – can learn from.

In doing this, we aspire to play our part in smoothing the progress of science – for the betterment of everyone.

Where you come in

You are an expert in your field. Your field may be large, or small. But whatever its size, however long you have been in the job, and whatever your particular suite of acquired experience is, thousands of your present and future colleagues can benefit from it.

An expert (for our purposes) is simply someone who knows something useful that many other people don’t know. So if you have been learning – let’s say, PCR – for the last 6 months, you have great insight into the pitfalls that a beginner might experience in getting to grips with the technique. And by sharing your insights, you will help other current and future beginners.

If you have been learning PCR for the last 6, 12, or even 18 years, you’ll have a different level and depth of experience to share – a bigger “field” if you like – that can help many levels of users of the technique.

But whatever level of experience you have, you have something to share. The key is to figure out which of the nuggets of wisdom you have acquired would be most beneficial to other people who are behind you on each particular learning curve.

Our challenge to you is this: Dig deep to identify your best nuggets of information, list them, and package them into short articles that are suffused with your personality, and the experience you have accumulated in your time in the lab. The more of you that is in each article, the more useful it will be for those thousands who pick it up and read it.

This document contains some guidelines and some suggestions to help you meet that challenge.

Choosing a topic for your next article

Whether you are a new author, an experienced author or an editor at Bitesize Bio, we know that at some time or another you will hit the same problem that we all have in producing content. And that is – what to write about.

This short handbook brings together the different approaches that we’ve used to keep the relevant, interesting, and useful articles flowing. It’s by no means an exhaustive list of approaches. There will be other ways out there – so if you have your own and you’d like to have it added here, we’d love to hear from you (contact us at nick@bitesizebio.com).

First a reminder of what we do at Bitesize Bio

Bitesize Bio equips, energizes, and supports bioscientists to reach their maximum professional potential by gathering all of the best tips, advice, tools, and know-how from the universe and sharing in easy-to-digest articles and videos.

Where you come in

Everyone has their own areas of expertise, small and large, and at Bitesize Bio we are sharing these so that we can all learn from each other, and improve together.

Figuring out what the problems are for scientists in the lab and coming up with articles that provide solutions or helpful resources to help them is at the core of fulfilling our mission.

As an experienced scientist, you know that there are a huge range of topics that the guys in the lab need help with

…from getting the minutia of individual techniques just right,

…to understanding how a technique or process works,

…through figuring out how to best approach publishing their work

…or even how to get on with their colleagues better.

…and much, much more.

And as a Bitesize Bio writer, part of your job is to pinpoint specific problems and come up with solutions and resources that solve them. You may also get the chance to take problems that others have spotted, and make a beautifully written article to solve it.

So where can you find these problems? Here’s what we suggest…

1: Your own experience

The first place to start with providing solutions and resources is to share the hard-won insights you personally won on the job. Those are valuable pieces of information and by sharing these, you benefit thousands of scientists all over the world who get to learn from your experience.

We would encourage you to continue to delve into your experience and know-how to pull out your personal pearls of wisdom and share them with the community.

Think hard, because often the little chunks of wisdom that you take for granted can be priceless to hundreds of other people who have not been exposed to that little insight.

We often find that it helps to think back to your first day in the lab. What do you know now – small or large – that would have made a difference to your progress, results and sanity if it had been explained to you on that day? There are other questions you can think about such as those below:

What areas do I feel I could support other bioscientists in? (Techniques, soft skills, basic lab know-how, vocational areas?)

For each of those techniques (or skills/vocational areas):

What are they key pointers I would give to someone at any given stage behind me on the learning curve?

What golden rules, routines, tools or shortcuts do I use that could help others improve or speed their work?

If I could go back in a time machine to talk to myself when I was at an earlier point in the learning curve, what would be the most helpful advice I could give?

Thinking back to when I was back down the learning curve, what were the burning questions I needed answers to, but was only able to answer much later?

If I were supervising a student or post-doc now, what advice would I give?

What questions do I hear students asking again and again?

What basic knowledge do I have that is difficult to find, and is frequently not known, or misunderstood, by people in the lab (e.g. how a technique/ piece of equipment works, why a certain approach is used rather than another etc).

What resources or references do I use in this area that others could really benefit from? (Or could I make a reference or resource that would be useful for people in this area?)

You have a great number of those small pieces of information and insight in there that could benefit others.

Find them, write them down, share them on Bitesize Bio and let them speed the progress of other scientists – and in turn make the wheels of science turn that little bit faster.

2: Share as you learn

We know from experience that after a while, the ideas that come spontaneously from your own experience start to come a little bit slower – this tends to happen after about article #20–100 or so but the number is different for everyone.

As this happens, you can still come up with new insights to share, by being aware of what you are learning, and sharing it as you go.

For example:

If you read a paper about improving a practice, a technique or any other aspect of science, share the insight you have gained from this in an article that pulls out the main points and links out to the paper so that the reader can get more information if needed.

As you become more experienced in a technique and start to get it to work better, jot down what you are learning so you can share it in an article.

If you are learning a new technique from scratch, summarize the main points you have learned, the most useful papers you read etc and provide a “Technique X: 101” article.

When you’re browsing a forum or website for solutions, you attend a useful seminar or read an enlightening book – summarise the main useful points in an article.

Basically, however you are learning and growing your experience and knowledge, stay aware that in Bitesize Bio, you have the outlet to share what you are learning as you learn it, for the benefit of other scientists – and your career/profile as a writer.

3: Going after the problems and solutions

If you want to speed along your work with Bitesize Bio you can take it to the next level by searching for problems that scientists are facing and providing, or finding solutions.

Scanning the web

All over the web and literature, scientists are talking about the problems they face in their jobs. Fora at places like Biotechniques, Protocol Online, SeqAnswers, Quora, Yahoo Answers and even the questions section at Bitesize Bio are packed with questions from scientists.

By scanning through these conversations, you can start to recognise recurring themes of problems that are plaguing scientists. Concentrating on the areas of science you are interested in, you can quickly build up a list of problems that need solving. And now you can write articles that solve them.

If we can’t come up with a solution to the problems, our preference is to do a bit of research on the web or textbooks to get a foundation of a solution, then mix in our own experience and know-how to create an original and useful article that will help people with this problem.

However, if the problem is way out of my knowledge areas, we add the topic as an article suggestion for Bitesize Bio’s staff writers to take on.

Ancient websites

In the early days of the web, some pioneering scientists jumped onto the web to produce terrible-looking but information-packed pages like this. These are a mine of information, facts and article ideas. To find these pages search for your search term followed by .edu or .ac.uk. e.g.: Cloning vectors .edu

Free tools

There are lots of free software tools out there for bioscientists. Pulling together a bunch of useful tools and trying them out, then reviewing/providing tips makes a great article.

4: Scan the literature

Most of the literature concentrates on results in specific areas of research. And rightly so as this is what progresses science. But the focus of Bitesize Bio is on the techniques and practices that enable this research.

The literature is studded with papers that talk about techniques, methods and practices, and how to improve them. And there are also papers that talk about non-tech solutions, like statistics, careers, etc.

These are all gold dust for us. You can pull the essence out of such a paper (or a bunch of them) to make a nice, succinct article that describes a solution to a lab problem. (You could also interview the author: See below).

Examples of journals that focus on techniques include:

5: Ask the scientists

If you would like to take your staff writer-dom to the next level, then interviews are in order. That is, you could interview some scientists (your colleagues, or otherwise) to get their tips for you to write up (you’ll credit them for the tip in your article of course!)

Here are some interviews you could do:

Grab a group of scientists near you and ask them what they would love to know, or what they regularly get stuck on. PhD students are best for this.

Or grab some other scientists near you and ask what their best tips are (and credit them in your article about the tip).

Arrange an interview (in person or on Skype) with someone who is expert in (or just very good at) a specific technique or area, and drill them for their best info and tips.

Interview a staff scientist at a specific company. (Let us know if you’d like to do this and we can send some scientists your way.)

Interview the author of a particular paper about the paper, and/or their expertise (just remember we talk about techniques/methods not research results so keep the discussion to that).

Interview someone who is prominent on Twitter, the Blogosphere, LinkedIn, etc. Find out what their best solutions and advice are. This could be a scientist, someone in science communication, a careers expert, a productivity expert or whatever. The internet is your oyster.

If you would be interested in conducting interviews like this, please let your editor know and we can discuss ideas and approaches with you, and (if required) also provide recording software for your smartphone or skype account so you can record the interviews.

6. Be inspired by Bitesize Bio

Bitesize Bio is full of great articles, but no one article can cover everything. Many of our articles could and should be expanded on in further articles or points that are briefly mentioned can be used to spawn new article ideas. For example:

An article discussing key pointers on how to choose a DNA polymerase could give rise to other article ideas including:

Understanding how different Polymerases work.
How to create your own polymerases.
New polymerases that have been generated or made available..
How to choose other aspects of your PCR reaction such as how to choose a thermocycler.
How to choose software to analyse your qPCR results.
How to choose between probes or Sybr Green Dye for your qPCR.
How to troubleshoot polymerases problems.

These topic are all related to one another and came from simply reading one article and thinking, what else do people need to know about these reagents or techniques? What do I wish I understood?

Have a browse through older articles on Bitesize Bio and see what holes are missing, then go out and try to fill them!

By really examining these questions (and others like them; if you come up with others, please share them with Nick and Laura [nick@bitesizebio.com / laura@bitesizebio.com]), you should be able identify areas in which you can really contribute to educating, influencing and supporting current and future bioscientists.

What your article should look like

Once you have your topic, it’s time to write. Here are some guidelines on how Bitesize Bio articles should be constructed.

LENGTH

Every Bitesize Bio article should be snappy, and easy to digest. Think of your nugget of wisdom being delivered to fellow bioscientists as they sip their brew during their coffee break. Educate them, help them, inform them, peak their interest – but don’t overload them.

Our guideline word count is 500-1500 words. But the real guide to how long an article should be is simply this: What are the fewest words you can use to communicate the key points you are trying to share, in a comprehensive, correct and friendly manner?

That means an important part of the editorial process (your own, and your editor’s) is to look for ways that your article can be cut down while still retaining (and improving!) the value and tone. So:

Find parts of the copy are not contributing to the value of the piece (a.k.a. fluff) and remove them or cut them down to the absolute minimum. The introduction and ending are particularly prone to fluff – beware!

Find tangents in the piece and eliminate or reduce them by linking out to other Bitesize Bio articles or external resources that cover the tangential points.
- e.g. in this article, the user needed to know about Coulomb’s Law, but this is a distraction from the core message of the article, so in the 6th paragraph a link to the wikipedia article on Coulomb’s law is provided.

TONE

The web is a wonderful place to write. It’s the land of freedom. It – and especially Bitesize Bio – is a place where you can drop all of the formality and stiffness you are used to in scientific writing and be yourself.

Your article is not a lecture or textbook entry. It is not a soapbox… and it is definitely not a manuscript or thesis. It is a bench-side conversation between you and someone you can truly help. So keep that in mind while you are writing.

Here are some ways we suggest you can hit the right tone:

– Be friendly and humble. Don’t be aloof; get right down there and empathise one-on-one with the person you are educating.

– Be positive. Articles should be positive and uplifting, and make the readers excited about their research. There will ofcourse be articles on negative topics (e.g. when things go wrong) but these should be written from a positive viewpoint (how to fix them).

– Be conversational. Think about how would you talk about this topic to someone who was right in front of you? Write like you’d talk.

– Be simple. Write using the simplest language that you can; science can be complicated enough.

– Write in the first person – to ONE reader (not “our readers” or “researchers”)

– Use relaxed American English.

– Use the active not passive voice when writing (see this article for more information on writing in the active voice)

– Please don’t be afraid to show your funny or quirky side. Laughing and learning should go hand-in-hand.

FORMATS

Your article can be plain, straight down-the-line prose. Sometimes that is what works best.

But blogging lends itself to the use of a wide variety of formats that make it very easy to get lots of information over in a way that is easy to read (and to write).

Things like lists, bullet points and the like go a long way to making what would be a long and slightly tedious article, punchy and easy to read. Throw in figures and tables and you can also cut down the word count, while maximising the information and value-count.

Another important thing to bear in mind when writing for the web, is to use the “return” key much more than you would in normal. By that I mean, split your paragraphs up to make them shorter, less dense and easier to read.

And NEVER be afraid to use a one-sentence paragraph to emphasise a point.

LEVEL

We advise you to aim your articles at PhD students and/or post-docs. So you could be talking about the very basic aspects of a technique or skill – or adding some specific know-how

EXAMPLES

For examples of articles that capture the tone, level, voice and content we are looking for, please check out this document.

WHAT WE ARE NOT LOOKING FOR

News (we leave that to the news sites)
Research findings (we are talking about enabling techniques and skills, not research outcomes – we leave that to the journals and science news sites)
Excerpts from textbooks. Does what you have written look like it could go into a textbook? If so – please try to dig a bit deeper and add more of yourself.
Excerpts from a product manual. Likewise, if your article looks like it could have come from a product manual, you are off track. e.g. Don’t just dryly list why a particular technique is a good approach – add some of your own wisdom and experience in there.

Images

When supplying images to include in your article please include this as separate image files rather than embedding them in your document. Images should be supplied as either .jgp or .png and should be a minimum of 600 dpi.

You can rescale images using a variety of imaging software such as GIMP, which is a free image manipulation software.

Images should be your own or be free to republish (such as those under a creative commons license). Images from publications should be avoided as these are often subject to copyright (there are exceptions such as those published in PLOS journals which are all covered by creative commons).

When supplying images please include details of where these were obtained (e.g. a weblink or say if they are your own).

Please be aware that if you have published an image previously that you may no longer retain the copyright (for example if it was published in a journal article, the journal will often hold the copyright).

References

Our format for references is:

[First author] [et al. if applicable] [(year)] [Title – with hyperlink to DOI or PubMed] [Journal name – in italics] [Volume]:[Page range].

An example is:

Neretti N et al. (2009) Long-lived Indy induces reduced mitochondrial reactive oxygen species production and oxidative damage. PNAS 106:2277–82.

For websites please use the following format:

[Author]. [Title]. [Organization/website]. [Publication Date] [Accessed date].

The hyperlink should be added over the title.

E.g.

Adrienne Huntress. The Ultimate Guide to Choosing a Fluorescent Protein. Bitesize Bio. Published 9 September 2021. (Accessed 15 September 2021.)

If there is no given author or publication date, leave that blank. E.g.:

ISO 5725-1:1994(en) Accuracy (trueness and precision) of measurement methods and results — Part 1: General principles and definitions. ISO. (Accessed 15 September 2021)

Mentioning Products, Services and Commercial Resources

Products, services and tools are an essential part of the solution for bioscientists (we couldn’t work without them). But while we are happy for products to be briefly mentioned in your article, the primary focus of your article must be education.

This means your article should not be focused primarily on the product (or service/tool) but it is ok to mention it in the context of the article.

A couple of rules of thumb to keep you right here are:

1. If you are mentioning one single product, the word count where you are talking about the product should make up no more than 3% of the article’s total word count.

2. If you are mentioning more than one product (competing, not from the same company), each product can take 3% of the total word count each.

Again – your article should NOT be specifically about the product, but should talk about the product as a solution to a wider problem.

Some examples could be:

1. Mention – compare/contrast several (competitive) products (e.g. “7 great ways to do a mini prep”; compare and contrast several kits with different features, discuss the features and maybe even talk about a home-made version)

2. Talk about a problem and possible solutions (one or more of which may be products)– discuss things like what the problem is, what is traditionally done to approach it and mention one (or preferably more than one) product that can address the problem, (e.g. “Common reasons for a high A260/280 ratio”; talk about what 260/280 is, where the common contamination comes from, approaches to minimise it, and Zymo’s kit that is specially designed to minimise contamination)

3. Frame the problem that the product/service is solving in a wider context; e.g. If you want to talk about Addgene – You could focus on the topic of collaboration in science — “Isn’t it crazy that we don’t share our science?”. Talk about some ways to promote collaboration/sharing in your own lab, how services like Addgene and Biobricks can help.

Basically, you should never just talk about the features of one product – if you are mentioning products, it should always be in a wider context.

And to help you get calibrated:

Here is an example of a good article that mentions products in an acceptable way

And here is an example of one that is not acceptable!

Editorial process

Your point of contact for submitting articles to Bitesize Bio is basecamp.

Upon submission, your article will be checked to see that it is suitable for publication. We may make suggested edits, or ask you to re-draft your article to bring it into agreement with the guidelines.

Once the final draft is approved it will be posted in the relevant channel on Bitesize Bio at the earliest opportunity.

Editorial Discretion

As mentioned above, products may briefly be mentioned in your article. We ask that you keep references to products within the context of a wider educational article. The Editor reserves the right to refuse publication if, in his opinion, the article is too product-centric. In such cases, we will work with you to re-draft your article until the content is suitable.

Author Credit

The author of the article, and his/her company affiliation will be credited in the author bio, which appears in the article. This bio may include a link to an appropriate page on a personal/company website or social media site.

Appendices

Appendix 1. Spelling

It is BsB style to use US English.

Please refer to the following list for spelling conventions.

follow-up (n., adj.), follow up (v.)

roundup (n., adj.), round up (v.)