LAUSR

The motivational speaker and author Brian Tracy once said, ‘The checklist is one of the most high-powered productivity tools ever discovered’. This is true across several disciplines, and scientific manuscripts are not an exception. There are several checklists designed for scientific publications like journal-specific submission checklists, clinical trial checklists, and data reporting checklists. While these serve a specific purpose and are very useful, the author thought of having a simple checklist for constructing any scientific manuscript. At a detailed level, any checklist would vary based on clinical or basic science work and the type of article being submitted. The purpose of this checklist is to help beginners avoid missing primary information while writing a paper. This checklist is by no means exhaustive and not intended to cover all the detailed aspects of specific manuscripts. The checklist is divided into five parts with a total of 90 items in a question format. The questions are framed in a way that almost all would require ‘yes’ as an answer for the item to be satisfactorily closed and proceed further. Part I gathers the desirable pre-requisites before the beginning of the study. Part II encompasses all the processes and aspects of a manuscript. Part III itemizes the response checklist when the manuscript comes for a revision. Part IV consists of items to consider in case the authors receive a letter to the editor. Part V contains general items to check before manuscript submission.