The drafting stage gives you the opportunity to check not only the structure and content of your paper, but to make sure key matters like publisher guidelines, bylines and intellectual property have been properly considered and addressed.

• Quality of your paper - The draft paper should be reviewed and proof-read. This includes feedback on the content of your paper (including title and abstract), as well as checks for consistency and accuracy in the main text, references, tables and figures. Consider those who are best placed to review your paper – co-authors, colleagues, supervisors, mentors – and the type of feedback they are able to provide, for example a more technical review versus a grammatical check.

• Instructions to authors from publishers - These are guidelines publishers expect you to follow and include instructions on how to submit the article, the format of the paper, word count, referencing style, acknowledging use of AI tools and similar matters. Investigate and follow publisher/journal style and format requirements.

• Byline - It is important all papers include 'The University of Western Australia' as part of the byline. This ensures the publication is captured in the UWA Research Repository. See the Guideline for applying the University byline for further information. 

• Acknowledgements - make sure that all appropriate acknowledgements (financial, infrastructure, use of AI tools or otherwise) have been made, and confirm with co-authors that all necessary acknowledgments have been included.

• Intellectual Property - Is the publication disclosing valuable intellectual property that is associated with or has arisen out of the research project? If confidential or proprietary information is disclosed in a publication without the consent of the owner of that information, you may be in breach of your research agreement, and you could cause wider issues for that intellectual property, including destroying it’s patentability.

Always refer back to any governing agreement (see tab Before you publish) and make sure those who need to see and approve your draft publication do so, and that you do not include any information you shouldn’t.  Additionally, disclosure of IP by publication may prevent you later protecting that IP with patent and subsequently the commercialisation of the idea.

Questions about intellectual property? Contact the Research Commercialisation team or the UWA Librarian Support team.