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Why grow to be a contributor?
We’re on the lookout for writers to propose up-to-date content focused on data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence and programming. Should you love to write down about these topics, read on!
Reach a broader audience together with your articles. We’re one of the vital popular data science sites on the earth. TDS began as a publication on Medium, amassing greater than 700k followers and becoming the most-read publication on the positioning. Now on a self-hosted platform, TDS is the leading destination in the information science community.
Listed below are just a few things we do to make sure your articles reach the biggest audience possible:
- Our independent domain (towardsdatascience.com) provides higher visibility and direct traffic to your work.
- We feature our greatest stories on our homepage, newsletter, and social media (LinkedIn, X, and more), and supply our authors with sophisticated publishing tools to higher tell their stories.
- We offer editorial support to assist refine and amplify high-quality submissions.
Submission Guidelines
Before submitting your article, there are just a few essential things you must know. Make sure that you read each point well, and that you just understand them, as by submitting an article to TDS, you’re agreeing to comply with all of them.
Please take just a few minutes to familiarize yourself with our Writer Terms and Conditions of Use — they govern the connection between contributors and TDS.
Any article you share with us should be entirely your personal original work; you may’t take other writers’ words and present them as your personal, and we also don’t allow AI-generated text, even whenever you’re the one who prompted its creation.
How To Submit Your Work
Recently, TDS made an enormous leap toward independence by moving off Medium and launching our self-hosted platform. We’re working swiftly to roll out an creator portal that may streamline article pitches and feedback.
Within the meantime, please send your upcoming article on to our team using this way.
Should you’re having a difficulty with our online form, please tell us via email ([email protected]) so we are able to enable you complete the method. Please don’t email us an article that you’ve gotten already sent via our form.
Guidelines
Learn how to get your article ready for publication!
We aim to strike a balance between innovating, informing and philosophizing. We would like to listen to from you! Should you will not be knowledgeable author, consider the next points when preparing your article. We would like to publish top quality, skilled articles that individuals need to read.
1. Is your story a story that should be told?
Before you begin writing, ask yourself: is that this story a story that should be told?
If you’ve gotten read many articles addressing the identical issue or explaining the identical concept, think twice before writing one other one. If you’ve gotten a radical, recent tackle an old chestnut, we would like to listen to from you… but, we want you to steer us that your article is something special that distinguishes itself from the pack and speaks to our audience.
Conversely, in case your article addresses an underserved area or presents a brand new idea or method, that’s just what we’re after!
2. What’s your message?
Tell us what your important message is, right from the beginning. Give your piece a handy guide a rough introduction that tells us:
- What’s your novel idea?
- Why should we care?
- How are you going to prove your point?
When you’ve got that out of the best way, you may be as conversational as you want, but keep calling back to the central message and provides us a solid conclusion.
Remember though, Towards Data Science isn’t your personal blog, keep it sharp and on-topic!
3. On the web, no person knows you’re a dog
You’ve got a brand new idea or a brand new way of doing things, you wish to tell the community and begin a discussion. Implausible, that’s what we would like too, but we’re not going to take without any consideration that you understand what you’re talking about or that we must always uncritically imagine what you say… you’ve got to steer us (your audience) that:
- The material is significant
- There may be a niche that should be filled
- You might have the reply
- Your solution works
- Your idea is predicated on a logical progression of ideas and evidence
- Should you are giving us a tutorial, tell us why people would want to make use of this tool and why your way is healthier than the methods already published.
You’ll be able to do that by explaining the background, showing examples, providing an experiment or simply laying out how data you’ve gotten extracted from various sources allowed you to synthesise this recent idea.
Are there arguments that counter your opinion or your findings? Explain why that interpretation conflicts together with your idea and why your idea comes out on top.
4. Do you’ve gotten a brief title with an insightful subtitle?
Should you scroll as much as the highest of this page, you will note an example of a title and subtitle. Your post must have a brief title and an extended subtitle that tell readers what your article is about or why they need to read it. Your header is helpful for attracting potential readers and making your intentions clear. To stay consistent and provides readers the very best experience possible, we don’t allow titles or subtitles written in all-caps. We also ask that you just avoid profanity in each your title and subtitle.
When your subtitle is directly under the title and formatted accurately, it’s going to show up in some post previews, which helps together with your click-through rate.
5. What makes your post beneficial to readers?
A successful post has a clearly defined and well-scoped goal, and follows through on its promise. In case your title tells us you’re going to unpack a posh algorithm, show the advantages of a brand new library, or walk us through your personal data pipeline, ensure the remainder of the post delivers.
Listed below are just a few tips that could enable you plan and execute a well-crafted post:
- 1. Determine what your topic is — and what it isn’t
Should you’re unsure what your post goes to be about, there’s little or no likelihood your audience will once they read it. Define the issue or query your article will tackle, and stick with it: anything that doesn’t address the core of your post should stay out.
- 2. Create a transparent plan
Together with your topic in hand, sketch out a transparent structure to your post, and be mindful the general structure it’ll follow. Keep in mind that your important goal is to maintain your reader engaged and well-oriented, so it’s never too early to take into consideration formatting and the way you’ll break down the subject into digestible sections. Consider adding section headings along the method to make your structure visible.
- 3. Use clear, action-driven language
Should you’re still finding your personal voice as a data-science creator, place to start out is keeping things clean, clear, and simple to follow.
In case your article is filled with neutral, generic verbs (prefer to be, have, go, grow to be, make, etc.), attempt to mix in additional precise motion verbs. When it is smart, use specific, vigorous descriptors as a substitute of lifeless ones (for instance, you might replace “easy” with “frictionless,” “accessible,” or “straightforward,” depending on the context).
There are few things editors appreciate greater than a clean first draft, so don’t forget to proofread your post a few times before sharing it with TDS: search for spelling, punctuation, and grammar issues, and do your best to repair them. What we hope to supply to our readers are clear explanations, a smooth overall flow — listen to those transitions! — and a robust sense of what you’re aiming to realize together with your post.
Should you’d prefer to expand your toolkit beyond the fundamentals, the Web is filled with great writing resources. Listed below are just a few ideas to enable you start:
- 4. Include your personal images, graphs, and gifs
Some of the effective ways to get your key points across to your readers is for instance them together with your compelling visuals.
For instance, in case you’re talking about a knowledge pipeline you built, text can only take you to this point; adding a diagram or flowchart could make things even clearer. Should you’re covering an algorithm or one other abstract concept, make it more concrete with graphs, drawings, or gifs to enhance your verbal descriptions. (Should you’re using images another person created, you’ll have to source and cite them rigorously — read our image guidelines below for more details.)
A robust visual component will hook your readers’ attention and guide them along as they read your post. It would also enable you develop a private style as an creator, grow your following, and draw more attention on social media.
6. Are your code and equations well displayed?
TDS readers like to tinker with the ideas and workflows you share with them, which implies that including a code implementation and relevant equation(s) in your post is commonly an amazing idea.
To make code snippets more accessible and usable, avoid screenshots. Use WordPress’s code blocks & inline code
To share math equations together with your readers, Embed.fun is an amazing option. Alternatively, you may use Unicode characters and upload a picture of the resulting equation.
While you include code or an equation inside your article, you should definitely explain it and add some context around it so readers of all levels can follow along.
To learn more about using these embeds and others in your post, take a look at this resource.
7. Check your facts
Each time you provide a fact, if it’s not self-evident, tell us where you learned it. Tell us who your sources are and where your data originated. If we would like to have a conversation all of us have to be on the identical page. Perhaps something you say will spark a discussion, but when we would like to be certain we will not be at cross purposes, we want to return to the unique and skim for ourselves in case we’re missing a significant piece of the puzzle that makes all the things you say make sense.
8. Is your conclusion to the purpose and never promotional?
Please ensure that you just include a conclusion at the top of your article. It’s an amazing method to help your readers review and remember the essential points or ideas you’ve covered. You can even use your conclusion to link an original post or just a few relevant articles.
Adding an additional link to your creator profile or to a social media account is advantageous, but please avoid call-to-action (CTA) buttons.
On your references, please respect this format:
[X] N. Name, Title (12 months), Source
For instance, your first reference should seem like this:
[1] A. Pesah, A. Wehenkel and G. Louppe, Recurrent Machines for Likelihood-Free Inference (2018), NeurIPS 2018 Workshop on Meta-Learning
9. Are your tags precise enough?
The more specific your tags, the simpler it’s for readers to search out your article and for us to categorise and recommend your post to the relevant audience.
We may change one or two tags before publication. We might do that only to maintain our different sections relevant to our readers. As an illustration, we might need to avoid tagging a post on linear regression as “Artificial Intelligence”.
10. Do you’ve gotten an incredible image?
An amazing image attracts and excites readers. That’s why all the very best newspapers at all times display incredible pictures.
That is what you may do so as to add a improbable featured image to your post:
- Use Unsplash. A lot of the content on Unsplash is advantageous to make use of without asking for permission. You’ll be able to learn more about their license here.
- Take one yourself. Your phone is nearly definitely adequate to capture a cool image of your surroundings. You would possibly even have already got a picture in your phone that may make an amazing addition to your article.
- Make an amazing graph. In case your post involves data evaluation, spend a while making no less than one graph truly unique. You’ll be able to try R, Python, D3.js or Plotly.
Should you determine to buy a license for a picture to be utilized in your article, please note that we only allow using images under a license that: (i) doesn’t expire; and (ii) that could be used for industrial purposes on the TDS Publication. You might be chargeable for ensuring you comply with the license terms of use. You need to also include a caption below the image, as follows, or as otherwise required by the license provider: “.” Finally, please email us a replica of a receipt or other evidence of the purchased license, together with the corresponding license terms of use.
Should you’ve chosen to create images to your article using an AI tool (like DALL·E 2, DALL·E, Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion, amongst others), it’s your responsibility to be certain that you’ve read, understood, and followed the tool’s terms. Any image you employ on TDS should be licensed for industrial use, including AI-generated images. Not all AI tools permit images for use for industrial purposes and a few require payment to allow you to make use of the image.
The pictures you generate with AI tools cannot violate the copyright of other creators. If the AI generated image resembles or is similar to an existing copyrighted image or fictional character (like Harry Potter, Fred Flinstone etc.), you will not be permitted to apply it to TDS. Use your best judgment and avoid AI-generated images that replicate or closely emulate one other work. If unsure, use a picture search tool — like Google Lens, TinEye, or others — to ascertain whether your images are too much like an existing work. We may ask that you just provide details of the text prompts you utilized in the AI tool to verify you probably did not use the names of copyrighted works.
Your text prompts cannot use the names of real people, nor can your images be used in the event that they feature an actual person (whether a celeb, politician, or anyone else).
Please remember to cite the source of your images even in case you aren’t legally obligated to accomplish that. Should you created a picture yourself, you may add () within the caption. Whichever way you choose to go, your image source should seem like this:
Your image should each have the source and the link to that source. Should you created a picture yourself, you may add “Image by creator”.
Should you’ve created a picture that was evenly inspired by an existing image, please add the caption “Image by Writer, inspired by source[include the link].” Should you’ve edited an existing image, please ensure you’ve gotten the suitable to make use of and edit that image and include the caption “Image by source[include the link], edited with permission by the creator.”
Danger zone: Don’t use images (including logos and gifs) you found online without explicit permission from the owner. Adding the source to a picture doesn’t grant you the suitable to make use of it.
11. Where did you get your data?
The Towards Data Science team is committed to the creation of a respectful community of information science authors, researchers, and readers. For our authors, this implies respecting the work of others, taking care to honor copyrights related to images, published material, and data. Please at all times be certain that you’ve gotten the suitable to gather, analyze, and present the information you’re using in your article.
There are many great sources of information which can be freely available. Try searching university databases, government open data sites, and international institutions, equivalent to the UCI Irvine Machine Learning Repository, U.S. Government, and World Bank Open Data. And don’t ignore sites that hold specific data regarding fields like physics, astrophysics, earth science, sports, and politics like CERN, NASA, and FiveThirtyEight.
TDS is a industrial publication. Before submitting your article to us, please confirm your dataset is licensed for industrial use, or obtain written permission to make use of it. Please note that not all of the datasets on the web sites we’ve listed are advantageous to make use of. Irrespective of where you obtain your data, we advise you to double-check that the dataset permits industrial use.
Should you aren’t confident you’ve gotten the suitable to make use of it for industrial purposes, consider contacting the owner. Many authors receive a fast, positive response to a well-constructed email. Explain how you plan to make use of the information, share your article or idea, and supply a link to TDS. While you receive permission, please forward a replica to us at [email protected].
This is very necessary in case you plan to make use of web scraping to create your personal dataset. If the web site doesn’t explicitly allow data scraping for industrial purposes, we strongly recommend that you just contact the web site owner for permission. Without explicit permission, we won’t have the ability to publish your work, so please forward us a replica via email.
And sometimes, easy works best! Should you just desire a dataset to clarify how an algorithm works, you may at all times create a synthetic or simulated dataset. Here’s a fast tutorial, and an article that uses a simulated dataset you would possibly find helpful.
Please remember so as to add a link to the positioning where the dataset is stored, and credit the owner/creator in your article. Ideally, this is completed on first mention of the dataset, or in a resource list at the top of the article. Please rigorously follow any instructions regarding attribution that you just find on the positioning. If you’ve gotten created your personal artificial or simulated dataset, it will be significant to say that too.
We all know interpreting a license could be difficult. It’s your responsibility to make certain which you can present your data and findings in an article published with TDS, but in case you’re stuck, please reach out to our editorial team for assistance. We might quite work with you within the early stages of your project than to must decline your accomplished article because of a dataset license issue.
13. Is your content original?
While we do accept content that has already been published (for instance, in your personal blog or website), our focus is on promoting and sharing recent and original content with our readers. That implies that by publishing your article in TDS first (or exclusively), you’ve gotten a greater likelihood to be featured on our publication, our social media channels, and in our newsletter.
We love original content since it’s something that our audience hasn’t seen before. We would like to provide as much exposure to recent material as possible and keep TDS fresh and up-to-date.
Originality also implies that you (and your coauthors, if any) are the only creator of each element in your post. Any time you depend on another person’s words, you’ve gotten to cite and quote them properly, otherwise we consider it an instance of plagiarism. This is applicable to human authors, in fact, but in addition to AI-generated text. We generally don’t allow any language created by tools like ChatGPT on TDS; in case your article discusses these tools and you would like to incorporate examples of text you generated, please keep them to a minimum, cite their source and the prompt you used, and make it very clear (for instance, through the use of block quotes) where the AI-generated portions begin and end.
14. Did you get any feedback before submitting your post?
Get into the habit of at all times asking a friend for feedback before publishing your article. Having worked so hard on that article, you wouldn’t need to let a silly mistake push readers away.
15. Has your Writer profile been accomplished accurately?
Please include your real name, a photo, and a bio. We don’t publish posts from anonymous writers — it’s easier to construct trust with readers once they associate your words with an actual person.
Use your profile to introduce yourself, your expertise, your and achievements — optimizing it’s going to enable you develop a meaningful relationship together with your audience beyond a single post.
Should you are an organization and would really like to publish with us, please note that we almost exclusively publish articles submitted directly from the creator.
16. Are you recovering?
Take a minute to reflect on the work you’ve gotten been doing to this point, and the present article you would like to publish. What value are you bringing, and to whom? By which ways are this text higher or worse than those you previously published?
Longform posts, columns, and online books
Have so much to say? Good. We like to dive deep into complex topics, and so do our readers. Here’s how you may publish longform posts, columns, and online books on TDS.
Longform posts
We love long reads! In case your article’s reading time is shorter than 25 minutes, we recommend that you just break it into multiple pieces — keep it as-is. A single post makes it easier for readers to go looking and find all the data they need, and fewer likely that they’ll miss a crucial a part of your argument.
To create a smoother reading experience, you may add a table of contents to orient your audience around your post. Adding high-quality images and a number of white space is at all times idea, too — an extended text doesn’t must be a wall of text.
We often add essentially the most engaging and thoughtful longform posts to our Deep Dives page.
Columns
In case your post’s reading time exceeds 25 minutes, or in case you plan to deal with the identical topic over multiple articles and an extended stretch of time, you may create your personal TDS column. All it takes are three steps:
- Add a custom tag to your post. This tag must be unique and reflect the theme of your project. Each time you publish a post with that tag, it’s going to be added to your column’s landing page: towardsdatascience.com/tagged/[your-tag].
- Add a kicker to your post. It’s like adding a subtitle but above your title.
- Link your kicker to your column’s landing page.
You’ll be able to create a TDS column and invite multiple authors to contribute. Just let your colleague(s) know which tag you made the decision to make use of in order that they will add the identical one to their articles. Listed below are some examples from our team.
Online Books
A column is an amazing format to make use of if you’ve gotten an open-ended topic that you just plan to write down about for some time. If, alternatively, your idea has a finite, defined scope and a transparent sense of progression from one post to the following, it’s possible you’ll need to create a series of articles that feels more like a web-based book. Here is the format we recommend using.
Keep the reading time of every article — or “chapter” — between 12 to 25 minutes, and aim for a series that has no less than 5 articles (but probably not greater than, say, 16). You’ll be able to add links to previous or subsequent items from inside each article — for instance, within the introduction and/or conclusion.
To publish your online book, you may submit all of your articles to our editorial team in a single go, or one after the other as you finish working on each. We’ll review them and publish them as they arrive along. Tell us your post is a component of a planned online book project.
Please be certain that each article or online book chapter follows the identical guidelines and rules as every other post that TDS publishes. Should you ever determine to sell or exclusively license your book to a 3rd party publisher, you should have to ensure you’ve gotten their consent to proceed to publish the book with TDS. Should you shouldn’t have such consent, it’s your responsibility to remove your content from the TDS publication.
How do you submit an article?
To grow to be a author, please send your article using our form. Please note that a brand new creator submission process is nearing launch, and this way can be retired upon it’s availability.
We aim to answer authors as quickly as possible and to allow them to know whether or not we’ve accepted their articles. On rare occasions, the quantity of submissions we receive makes it difficult to answer everyone; as a general rule, in case you haven’t heard from us inside every week of submitting your post, it’s protected to assume we won’t move forward with publishing it.
Contribute to Towards Data Science
Should you’re having a difficulty with our online form, please tell us via email ([email protected]) so we are able to enable you complete the method. Please don’t email us an article that you’ve gotten already sent via our form.
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