From Question to Publication: A Research Handbook for Life Sciences Graduate Students is an open educational resource that guides graduate students through the full research cycle from a library perspective.
The handbook synthesizes peer-reviewed scholarship on scientific communication, information literacy, research methodology, and scholarly publishing into a web-first book that can also be distributed as a print-ready PDF and EPUB.
What This Resource Covers
The fourteen chapters and two appendices address every major stage of the research cycle: formulating a research question, searching and evaluating the literature, designing a study, managing and sharing research data, writing a scientific manuscript, selecting a journal, navigating peer review, understanding open access publishing, presenting at conferences, building an online academic identity, interpreting research metrics, and using AI tools responsibly.
Library Perspective
This handbook is written from a library perspective, emphasizing information literacy, access to resources, scholarly communication systems, and the role of librarians and libraries throughout the research process. Where relevant, chapters point readers toward library services including interlibrary loan, database access, research consultations, and institutional open access support.
Audience
The primary audience is graduate students in the life sciences — biology, biochemistry, ecology, neuroscience, genetics, and related fields. The content is written to be accessible to first-year students while remaining substantive enough to be useful to advanced doctoral candidates and early-career researchers.
Platform
This project uses Quire and Eleventy to generate a static web book from Markdown, YAML, and asset files.
Attribution
This handbook was written by Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic, and is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.