42
| 2 | 2012
Klinisk Biokemi i Norden
The Arctic Experience 2012:
The challenge of writing a scientific manuscript
in four days
Eva Greibe
Department of Clinical Biochemistry, Aarhus University Hospital, Aarhus.
“
Publish or perish” - What a
phrase! - coined to describe the
pressure in the academic world to
rapidly and continuously publish
scientific papers in order to
sustain and further ones career.
Maybe, it was this phrase that
drove or inspired the thirteen young (and self-pro‑
claimed promising) scientists to participate in an
intense writing course in the freezing Norwegian
mountains in how to write a scientific manuscript
in only four days. The course is called The Arctic
Experience 2012 – and what an experience it was!
Introduction
In the academic world, the pressure to publish sci-
entific papers put a strain on young researchers to
improve their scientific writing skills and become
talented writers in order to succeed in the competi-
tion. It is not enough to be intelligent and make out-
standing research – you also need to communicate
your research to the world. It is only when research is
published and thereby included in the “scientific pool
of knowledge”, that it “exists” – not in the drawer.
The Arctic Experience was an ambitious project
undertaken by the Editorial Board of the Scandina-
vian Journal of Clinical and Laboratory Investigation
(
SJCLI). The aim of the project was to teach young
researchers the art of writing a scientific manuscript.
The hypothesis was that by increasing the awareness
of young researchers to the importance of scientific
writing, and teaching them how to conduct a manus-
cript; the young scientists would become better equip-
ped for a life in research and have a higher chance to
succeed in the scientific world. A secondary aim of
the project was to improve networking among young
researchers within the field of clinical biochemistry
in the Nordic countries.
In The Arctic Experience, thirteen young resear-
chers – inexperienced in scientific writing and publis-
hing – was educated in the art of scientific writing,
and given four days to write a complete scientific
manuscript based on a given dataset and handed-
out literature.
Materials and Methods
The Arctic Experience was conducted from February
14
th
to 17
th
, 2012,
and took place in the beautiful
snow-covered mountains (read: in the middle of
nowhere) at Finse, Norway. The desolated location
was selected in order to provide the participants
with the necessary tranquility and inner calm for
completing the task of writing a scientific manuscript
in four days.
The participants were recruited by online announ-
cements and advertisement in the very respectable
meta-scientific journal, Klinisk Biokemi i Norden.
All participants (n = 13) were female (please note,
that even though all the SJCLI editors were male, the
sex distribution of the participants was completely
random). The nationality of the study cohort was Fin-
nish (n = 2), Swedish (n = 2), Norwegian (n = 3), and
Danish (n = 6). The participants had very different
scientific backgrounds, but all exerted an exceptional
interest for clinical biochemistry.
The study was not approved by the local ethics
committee, and the participants did not give written
informed consent. However, all participants seemed
