If you’re an early-career researcher (ECR), you probably spend a lot of your time doing the hands-on work of research. At the same time, few publications are written solely by early-career researchers, and it can feel like there are few opportunities to tell your own research story to a wider audience. At Nature Reviews Physics, we want to showcase the whole spectrum of ECR experiences (C.-H. Feng et al., Nat. Rev. Phys. 3, 772–776; 2021) in our pages, so we are reserving two article types — Tools of the Trade and Journal Club — for ECRs. Tools of the Trade articles demonstrate the variety of experimental, theoretical and numerical methods used across physics; Journal Club articles provide a glimpse into the decision making in the first few years of a scientist’s journey.

There’s another reason we invite you to work with us on one of our ECR articles. You’re well aware that communicating your research outside of your specialist community is important but may feel unequipped to do so. Many research groups or institutions lack people with the right expertise to provide training, or their experts don’t have the time to mentor everyone. We at Nature Reviews Physics can help to fill this gap.

As professional editors, we provide feedback on the structure and accessibility of Review and opinion articles on a near-daily basis. Pitching both the content and language of a piece at the right level for the intended audience has become second nature to us. We believe these skills are valuable for you, too, whether you work in academic research or move to a job in industry, and it’s worth learning early in your career.

Our ECR articles are short pieces that cover a method or a paper that you are familiar with, so that literature research, figure preparation and similar technical aspects of paper writing are kept to a minimum. It’s also why authorship is limited to one person. We believe this is the best way to ensure you get the most from this experience, as you will receive personalized feedback on your writing. We hope interacting directly with one of our editors will increase your confidence and make it easier to take on the role of corresponding author on a bigger project in the future. Plus, at the end of the process, you will have a Nature Reviews Physics publication to your name.

To help you decide which of our two ECR article types works best for you, let us explain their distinct characteristics in more detail.

Tools of the Trade are accessible introductions to an existing method or technique that you have developed or are using on a regular basis. We cover experimental and theoretical tools alike, whether they are for fabrication, characterization, modelling or intended for a more general purpose, such as bioimaging. All we ask is that you are familiar with the technique from your research and that you do not include unpublished findings. If you co-developed it, a Tools of the Trade article is your platform to explain it in a non-technical way to a wider audience. If it is a more established method that you use for a specific purpose, we suggest you provide some tips and tricks that may help other users. Tools of the Trade are accompanied by a photo of the setup or a sample, or similar imagery.

We appreciate that not every researcher has an interest in methods, which is why we have recently added Journal Club to our article types. These are short summaries of a paper that has impacted your research career in some way. Whether it’s the paper that got you interested in your current area of research or an article that solved a problem halfway through your PhD, we’d like to hear your story as part of the article. It doesn’t matter how recent the paper is, but you need to have some kind of personal connection to it.

We therefore invite all ECRs, from research students to early postdocs, to propose either a Tools of the Trade or Journal Club article for Nature Reviews Physics by completing this form. Wherever you are in the world, whatever method you work with, whatever your paper story is, we want to hear from you.