My first two papers have been published online this month with some kind friends' help. It is a little shame for me to say it, because it take me over three years to achieve this course, and many my classmates have already published a long list of good papers until now. However, i learned a lot from the course. Now i want to have a conclusion and share some with others.
1> Avoid to publish the paper for the sake of publishing itself as possible. We will not feel any happy but depressed at last if one day we found that our paper had no any indeed contribution to our field. Unfortunately, i also did bad in it before, so it is my lesson.
2> Design and consider the experimental details before beginning it.
3> Put emphasis on the analysis of data, and be sure of their accuracy. As for how to get a beautiful graph, we can refer to one excellent PPT "how to deal with the data".
4> Learn some scientific writing skills. The details may be refered to some excellent articles such as "how to write a paper" by a professor of Cambridge.
5> Put the draft on the desk and revise it several weeks/months later. Alternatively, send it to others for the review if possible before the post.
6> Be concise as possible. One common problem for the freshman like me is that we used to stack all that we know not the new finding.
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If you have interest in my papers, you can reach it at the following address:
X.B. Zhang, Z. L. Pei, J. Gong, C. Sun, “Investigations on the electrical property and inhomogeneous distribution of ZnO:Al thin films prepared by dc magnetron sputtering at low deposition temperature”, J. Appl. Phys. 101, 014910 (2007). [Link][Full Text].
[ It is a developing trend to deposite thin films and fabricate the device at the lower processing temperature, the same to the preparation of TCO films such as AZO by magnetron sputtering. However, there are still some difficult problems to solve that the properties of TCO films are severe degraded and inhomogeneous under the low temperature processing conditions. Although many researcher have already investigated it, there are not a clear and consistent explaination on the origin of the inhomogeneity in the literature. This paper was aimed to clarify the two existing main opinions and deduce some feasible methods. I ever thought that my opinion was undoubtable. Now i think that i should do more experiment and give more sufficient evidences to support the viewpoint because we used to trust in our own opinion too easy and hardly oppugn it, although i don't think my opinion is wrong until now. ]
X.B. Zhang, J. Q. Xiao, Z. L. Pei, J. Gong, C. Sun, “Influence of external solenoid coil arrangement and excitation mode on plasma characteristics and target utilization in a DC-magnetron sputtering system”, J. Vac. Sci. Technol. A 25, 209 (2007). [Link] [Full Text].
[The improvement of target utilization and the independent control of plasma growth parameters are still two critical issues and worth concerning further. However, the research objective of this paper is a gradually outdated and abandoned technique (this method appeared in the beginning of 1990s). Therefore, it is more wise to do research on the promising technique; but i had no wide enough eyeshot and deep understanding on this field in the beginning. Of course, hope that there are still few useful elements existed in it. ]
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