Scientific Writing – How to write when you can’t?

A freelance scientific writer can help businesses and organizations develop authoritative and reliable technical documents. Here’s how to hire the best-suited freelancer for your project. 

Many busy professionals have bright scientific ideas that need to be published in the form of an abstract, an article, a proposal, a report, or a blog article. Developing these scientific publications takes time. There are not just enough hours in the day.

When a post-doc or a professional accepts a job as a faculty member, they inadvertently step on to the treadmill of publications. Advancement in academia follows a simple principle – ‘publish or perish’, and perish is not an option. Writing journal articles, reviews, or abstracts pulls these professionals away from their favorite spot – their labs.

To stay focused at what they do the best, some busy professionals delegate writing tasks to expert science writers. As often mentioned by clients, few advantages of hiring PhD or postdoc science writers are:

1. a) Faster manuscript development: Often, developing a ‘first draft’ is a cumbersome process and involves many steps such as literature search, compiling experimental data and input from collaborators. Clients have often noticed that hiring a dedicated expert science writer shortens the overall publication development time. If a science journalist needs to publish time sensitive articles such as articles regarding Ebola epidemic, collaborating with a PhD or postdoc writers ensures quick turn-around time.
2. b) Cost effective: Professionals that face resource crunch can benefit from hiring a freelancer. Many new companies or labs cannot bear expenses associated with finding and retaining talent; for instance, hiring a full-time expert science writer or an experienced postdoc is not possible with a shoe-string budget. Seeking services from expert freelancers based on the writing requirements is a cost effective way to meet the company needs.

To write quality manuscripts access to an academic library for text books, references or an association (journal memberships) to know the current trends in the field is necessary. The subject matter experts keep up with the recent advancements in the field and hence, they bring in fresh, novel and bright ideas in science writing without additional costs.

These days to produce publication quality images, diagrams, tables, charts and graphs specialized software needs to be used. The cost of software can add up to be a major and unnecessary expense. Expert freelancers own the necessary software for their work and hence are a preferred option for companies on budget.

1. c) Quality: Expert freelancers such as PhD and postdoc professionals are trained to write quality drafts that have attention to detail which is necessary to avoid mistakes related to scientific details. Additionally, some entrepreneurs or faculties, who themselves are the subject matter experts, to ensure the quality of publication hire another expert professional for scientific editing services or for designing powerpoints/ prezi presentations.
2. d) Credibility: Often new entrepreneurs do not have sufficient experience in scientific writing. An expert science writer, through their experience, quality of writing and accuracy of detail can add credibility to the project.

After making a decision to delegate scientific writing, the search of an expert science writer can be a struggle. Busy clients try to network and develop collaborations at various conferences or join a virtual group on professional social media such to find a good expert freelancer science writer. These time-consuming methods need to be replaced with a fast paced, safe, interactive environment leading to more collaboration between the experts and the businesses. With the rise of new freelance economy, a special marketplace for the experts and their clients can advance today’s science to fulfill the needs of future.

Kolabtree makes it easy and risk-free for you to speak with multiple experts to ensure they understand your requirements, before you choose the best-suited expert.

Ready to hire a freelance scientific writer? Post your project on Kolabtree and get quotes from expert writers for free.

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Scientific writers     Freelance medical writers     Literature search experts    Technical writers