So welcome to the first not lecture, lecture of galaxies and cosmology.

And this is the first of a set of two lectures.

We'll have one today and the next one in two weeks,

where we essentially talk about not about galaxies and cosmology,

but about procedural things in preparation for the exercises

and for the whole proposal writing exercise.

And what we do today and in two weeks is today we are going to talk about how to write

and also how to read scientific papers.

We have to talk about how to write a scientific paper,

because once you know the things that are behind writing scientific papers,

you'll also be able to read scientific papers,

because in some sense writing a scientific paper is a recipe,

and once you know the recipe, it's fairly easy to write one.

Fairly easy meaning you still need several months for real paper.

But on the other hand also once you know the recipe,

this also helps you in understanding what parts of scientific papers are interesting.

So part of your proposal writing will be that you have to go a bit in the literature,

use the knowledge that you've gained from the lecture,

and then read the professional papers,

and in some sense condense information from these papers

to make a case for why some new observation should be done.

This is very doable, but reading many papers takes time,

and as part of this you need to know how to find the papers.

How do I find the important information about say an astronomical object, about a subject?

And you need to know what parts of a paper to read,

because you'll have to read like 20 papers or so to get an overview, and that takes time.

I can read several papers in an evening with no problem,

but the reason for this is that I read the papers perhaps differently than beginners do,

because I know what's important and what's not important.

And part of this I know because I know the process, and that's what we talk about today.

So even though this is more a lecturing style,

you should really interrupt me in case something is unclear.

We do have a large amount of material that I gave you,

and the slides are very ugly in part because there's lots of text on it.

I'm not going to talk about many of the points that are there, so this is also reference for you.

But talk about things that are unclear, ask, and we can discuss them.

So what I want to talk about is why do we write papers in the first place?

We need to talk about how are papers published, what's the whole process behind a scientific paper?

We need to talk about the structure of scientific papers and also the ideas on how to write a scientific paper.

And we'll end discussions about finding background information, mainly for astronomy,

but a lot of this will also be useful, for example, if you're in physics.

And I'll also give you some pointers about scientific English,

because scientific English is different to spoken English,

and there are very good guides out there that help you with writing scientific English that you should take a look at.

Not only because it might be important for galaxies cosmology,

and it's not because language will not be part of the final grade,

but it will be important for you for whatever text you write in English as part of a physics or computer science or whatever you study process.

So why do we write papers?

The answer is very simple.

The papers are the way how in science we communicate with each other.