LAST UPDATED JANUARY 2024
Write for Towards Data Science
Share your concepts, ideas, and codes with a broader audience
New authors
All the information you need before sharing your work with TDS for the first time:
- Why become a contributor?
- Submission rules
- Guidelines
- Longform posts, columns, and online books
- How can you contribute?
- FAQs
Current authors
Resources and advice for authors who have already published with TDS:
Why become a contributor?
Towards Data Science Inc. operates an independent Medium publication. We are looking for writers to propose up-to-date content focused on data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence and programming. If you love to write about these topics, read on!
Reach a broader audience with your articles. We are one of the most popular data science blogs in the world and most-read Medium publications with more than 650K followers.
Here are a few things we do to ensure your articles reach the largest audience possible:
- We have a custom domain (towardsdatascience.com as opposed to medium.com/towards-data-science) which can help drive more traffic to your article.
- We work closely with Medium to ensure that the stories in TDS meet Medium’s editorial and distribution standards, and stories in TDS often see further distribution because of that.
- We recommend our best stories for a Medium “Boost” so they reach the largest possible audience.
- We feature our content on our publication’s pages and social media: Linkedin and Twitter.
- We send newsletters that feature stories and writers.
Earn money through the Medium Partner Program. Writers can choose to meter stories that are on TDS and earn money through the Medium Partner Program based on engagement from Medium members. “Metering” refers to making a story eligible to earn money behind Medium’s metered paywall.
Writers keep 100% of the earnings they earn through their Medium account as part of the Medium Partner Program. However, the Medium Partner Program is not administered by TDS and we do not pay contributors directly for articles they voluntarily contribute.
You will remain the only owner of your work and will be able to delete it at any moment, even after we have published it. The feedback our editors and community provide will appear at the relevant places in your article. You will be able to dismiss or respond to them.
Submission rules
Before submitting your article, there are a few essential things you need to know. Make sure you read each point well, and that you understand them, as by submitting an article to TDS, you are agreeing to comply with all of them.
- Medium’s Rules and Terms of Service apply to Towards Data Science (TDS) as it is a Medium publication. Make sure you read it before submitting your article.
- We have adopted Medium’s Curation Guidelines for every article we publish. This means that if your post isn’t of a high enough quality to be curated or doesn’t follow the guidelines, we won’t publish it on Towards Data Science.
- Please take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with our Author Terms and Conditions of Use, as well as our Privacy Policy — they govern the relationship between contributors and TDS.
- Please don’t submit more than three stories at once. To ensure a timely response to all authors, we ask that you only send us up to three stories at a time, and wait until you hear back from us before you send the next one. If you’ve written a longer series, you can send it all in one go, but please leave a note in your first post to let our team know.
- You can make minor edits to a published article as long as they respect our rules and guidelines. Also, you can remove your article from our publication at any time.
- Any article you share with us must be entirely your own original work; you can’t take other writers’ words and present them as your own, and we also don’t allow AI-generated text, even when you’re the one who prompted its creation.
- We might directly edit your content to correct basic spelling mistakes and update minimal formatting. Also, we might remove images where the source isn’t clearly stated.
- We can remove any articles you post on Towards Data Science for any reason. If we do so, your content will not be lost but still hosted on Medium.com and redirected there.
- If our editorial team finds one or more violations of our rules, we can remove you and all of your articles from our publication and report them to Medium.
Guidelines
How to get your article ready for publication!
We aim to strike a balance between innovating, informing and philosophizing. We want to hear from you! But we do ask that if you are not a professional writer, you consider the following points when you prepare your article. We want to publish high quality, professional articles that people want to read.
1. Is your story a story that needs to be told?
Before you start writing, ask yourself: is this story a story that needs to be told?
If you have read many articles addressing the same issue or explaining the same concept, think twice before writing another one. If you have a radical, new take on an old chestnut, we want to hear from you… but, we need you to persuade us that your article is something special that distinguishes itself from the pack and speaks to our audience.
Conversely, if your article addresses an underserved area or presents a new idea or method, that’s just what we are after!
2. What is your message?
Let us know what your main message is, right from the start. Give your piece a snappy introduction that tells us:
- What is your novel idea?
- Why should we care?
- How are you going to prove your point?
Once you’ve got that out of the way, you can be as conversational as you like, but keep calling back to the central message and give us a solid conclusion.
Remember though, Towards Data Science is not your personal blog, keep it sharp and on-topic!
3. On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog
You’ve got a new idea or a new way of doing things, you want to tell the community and start a discussion. Fantastic, that’s what we want too, but we’re not going to take for granted that you know what you are talking about or that we should uncritically believe what you say… you’ve got to persuade us (your audience) that:
- The subject matter is important
- There is a gap that needs to be filled
- You have the answer
- Your solution works
- Your idea is based on a logical progression of ideas and evidence
- If you are giving us a tutorial, tell us why people would need to use this tool and why your way is better than the methods already published.
You can do this by explaining the background, showing examples, providing an experiment or just laying out how data you have extracted from various sources allowed you to synthesise this new idea.
Are there arguments that counter your opinion or your findings? Explain why that interpretation conflicts with your idea and why your idea comes out on top.
4. Do you have a short title with an insightful subtitle?
If you scroll up to the top of this page, you will see an example of a title and subtitle. Your post needs to have a short title and a longer subtitle that tell readers what your article is about or why they should read it. Your header is useful for attracting potential readers and making your intentions clear. To remain consistent and give readers the best experience possible, we do not allow titles or subtitles written in all-caps. We also ask that you avoid profanity in both your title and subtitle.
When your subtitle is directly under the title and formatted correctly, it will show up in some post previews, which helps with your click-through rate. To correctly format your subtitle on Medium, type it out, highlight the text and then click the smaller of the two Ts in the popup window.
5. What makes your post valuable to readers?
A successful post has a clearly defined and well-scoped goal, and follows through on its promise. If your title tells us you’re going to unpack a complex algorithm, show the benefits of a new library, or walk us through your own data pipeline, make sure the rest of the post delivers. Here are a few pointers to help you plan and execute a well-crafted post:
1. Decide what your topic is — and what it isn’t
If you’re not sure what your post is going to be about, there’s very little chance your audience will when they read it. Define the problem or question your article will tackle, and stick to it: anything that doesn’t address the core of your post should stay out.
2. Create a clear plan
With your topic in hand, sketch out a clear structure for your post, and keep in mind the overall structure it’ll follow. Remember that your main goal is to keep your reader engaged and well-oriented, so it’s never too early to think about formatting and how you’ll break down the topic into digestible sections. Consider adding section headings along the way to make your structure visible.
3. Use clear, action-driven language
If you’re still finding your personal voice as a data-science author, a good place to start is keeping things clean, clear, and easy to follow.
If your article is full of neutral, generic verbs (like to be, have, go, become, make, etc.), try to mix in more precise action verbs. When it makes sense, use specific, lively descriptors instead of dull ones (for example, you could replace “easy” with “frictionless,” “accessible,” or “straightforward,” depending on the context).
There are few things editors appreciate more than a clean first draft, so don’t forget to proofread your post a couple of times before sharing it with TDS: look for spelling, punctuation, and grammar issues, and do your best to fix them. What we hope to offer to our readers are clear explanations, a smooth overall flow — pay attention to those transitions! — and a strong sense of what you’re aiming to achieve with your post.
If you’d like to expand your toolkit beyond the basics, the Internet is full of great writing resources. Here are a few ideas to help you get started:
- Writing for an academic journal: 10 tips. The Guardian
- 6 of the Best Pieces of Advice from Successful Writers
- Steven Pinker’s Sense of Style
4. Include your own images, graphs, and gifs
One of the most effective ways to get your key points across to your readers is to illustrate them with your compelling visuals.
For example, if you’re talking about a data pipeline you built, text can only take you so far; adding a diagram or flowchart could make things even clearer. If you’re covering an algorithm or another abstract concept, make it more concrete with graphs, drawings, or gifs to complement your verbal descriptions. (If you’re using images someone else created, you’ll need to source and cite them carefully — read our image guidelines below for more details.)
A strong visual component will hook your readers’ attention and guide them along as they read your post. It will also help you develop a personal style as an author, grow your follower count on Medium, and draw more attention on social media.
6. Are your code and equations well displayed?
TDS readers love to tinker with the ideas and workflows you share with them, which means that including a code implementation and relevant equation(s) in your post is often a great idea.
To make code snippets more accessible and usable, avoid screenshots. Instead, here are two solutions for you to choose from:
- Use Medium’s native code blocks & inline code
- Embed GitHub gists
To share math equations with your readers, Embed.fun is a great option. Alternatively, you can use Unicode characters and upload an image of the resulting equation.
When you include code or an equation within your article, be sure to 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 Medium post, check out this resource.
7. Check your facts
Whenever you provide a fact, if it’s not self-evident, let us know where you learned it. Tell us who your sources are and where your data originated. If we want to have a conversation we all need to be on the same page. Maybe something you say will spark a discussion, but if we want to be sure we are not at cross purposes, we need to go back to the original and read for ourselves in case we are missing a vital piece of the puzzle that makes everything you say make sense.
8. Is your conclusion to the point and not promotional?
Please make sure that you include a conclusion at the end of your article. It’s a great way to help your readers review and remember the essential points or ideas you’ve covered. You can also use your conclusion to link an original post or a few relevant articles.
Adding an extra link to your Medium profile or to a social media account is fine, but please avoid call-to-action (CTA) buttons.
For your references, please respect this format:
[X] N. Name, Title (Year), Source
For example, your first reference should look 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 easier it is for readers to find your article and for us to classify and recommend your post to the relevant audience.
We may change one or two tags before publication. We would do this only to keep our different sections relevant to our readers. For instance, we would want to avoid tagging a post on linear regression as “Artificial Intelligence”.
10. Do you have an amazing image?
A great image attracts and excites readers. That’s why all the best newspapers always display incredible pictures.
This is what you can do to add a fantastic featured image to your post:
- Use Unsplash. Most of the content on Unsplash is fine to use without asking for permission. You can learn more about their license here.
- Take one yourself. Your phone is almost certainly good enough to capture a cool image of your surroundings. You might even already have an image on your phone that would make a great addition to your article.
- Make a great graph. If your post involves data analysis, spend some time making at least one graph truly unique. You can try R, Python, D3.js or Plotly.
If you decide to purchase a license for an image to be used in your article, please note that we only allow the use of images under a license that: (i) does not expire; and (ii) that can be used for commercial purposes on the TDS Publication. You are responsible for ensuring you comply with the license terms of use. You must also include a caption below the image, as follows, or as otherwise required by the license provider: “Image via [license provider’s name] under license to [your name].” Finally, please email us a copy of a receipt or other evidence of the purchased license, along with the corresponding license terms of use.
If you’ve chosen to create images for your article using an AI tool (like DALL·E 2, DALL·E, Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion, among others), it’s your responsibility to ensure that you’ve read, understood, and followed the tool’s terms. Any image you use on TDS must be licensed for commercial use, including AI-generated images. Not all AI tools permit images to be used for commercial purposes and some require payment to permit you to use the image.
The images you generate with AI tools cannot violate the copyright of other creators. If the AI generated image resembles or is identical to an existing copyrighted image or fictional character (like Harry Potter, Fred Flinstone etc.), you are not permitted to use it on TDS. Use your best judgment and avoid AI-generated images that copy or closely emulate another work. If in doubt, use an image search tool — like Google Lens, TinEye, or others — to check whether your images are too similar to an existing work. We may also ask that you provide details of the text prompts you used in the AI tool to confirm you did not use the names of copyrighted works.
Your text prompts cannot use the names of real people, nor can your images be used if they feature a real person (whether a celebrity, politician, or anyone else).
Please remember to cite the source of your images even if you aren’t legally obligated to do so. If you created an image yourself, you can add (Image by author) in the caption. Whichever way you decide to go, your image source should look like this:
Your image should both have the source and the link to that source. If you created an image yourself, you can add “Image by author”.
If you’ve created an image that was lightly inspired by an existing image, please add the caption “Image by Author, inspired by source[include the link].” If you’ve edited an existing image, please make sure you have the right to use and edit that image and include the caption “Image by source[include the link], edited with permission by the author.”
Danger zone 🚩
Do not use images (including logos and gifs) you found online without explicit permission from the owner. Adding the source to an image doesn’t grant you the right to use it.
11. Where did you get your data?
The Towards Data Science team is committed to the creation of a respectful community of data science authors, researchers, and readers. For our authors, this means respecting the work of others, taking care to honor copyrights associated with images, published material, and data. Please always ensure that you have the right to collect, analyze, and present the data you’re using in your article.
There are plenty of great sources of data that are freely available. Try searching university databases, government open data sites, and international institutions, such as the UCI Irvine Machine Learning Repository, U.S. Government, and World Bank Open Data. And don’t forget about sites that hold specific data relating to fields like physics, astrophysics, earth science, sports, and politics like CERN, NASA, and FiveThirtyEight.
TDS is a commercial publication hosted on Medium, a commercial entity. So before submitting your article to us, please verify your dataset is licensed for commercial use, or obtain written permission to use it. Please note that not all the datasets on the websites we’ve listed are fine to use. No matter where you obtain your data, we advise you to double-check that the dataset permits commercial use.
If you aren’t confident you have the right to use it for commercial purposes, consider contacting the owner. Many authors receive a quick, positive response to a well-constructed email. Explain how you intend to use the data, share your article or idea, and provide a link to TDS. When you receive permission, please forward a copy to us at publication@towardsdatascience.com.
This is especially important if you plan to use web scraping to create your own dataset. If the website does not explicitly allow data scraping for commercial purposes, we strongly recommend that you contact the website owner for permission. Without explicit permission, we won’t be able to publish your work, so please forward us a copy via email.
And sometimes, simple works best! If you just want a dataset to explain how an algorithm works, you can always create an artificial or simulated dataset. Here’s a quick tutorial, and an article that uses a simulated dataset you might find helpful.
Please remember to add a link to the site where the dataset is stored, and credit the owner/creator in your article. Ideally, this is done on first mention of the dataset, or in a resource list at the end of the article. Please carefully follow any instructions relating to attribution that you find on the site. If you have created your own artificial or simulated dataset, it is important to mention that too.
We know interpreting a license can be challenging. It is your responsibility to be certain that you can present your data and findings in an article published with TDS, but if you’re stuck, please reach out to our editorial team for assistance. We would rather work with you in the early stages of your project than to have to decline your completed article due to a dataset license issue.
12. Have you respected Medium’s guidelines?
We have adopted Medium’s curation guidelines for every article we publish. This means that if your post isn’t of a high enough quality to be curated or doesn’t follow the curation guidelines, we won’t publish it on Towards Data Science.
13. Is your content original?
While we do accept content that has already been published (for example, on your personal blog or website), our focus is on promoting and sharing new and original content with our readers. That means that by publishing your article in TDS first (or exclusively), you have a greater chance to be featured on our publication, our social media channels, and in our newsletter.
We love original content because it’s something that our audience hasn’t seen before. We want to give as much exposure to new material as possible and keep TDS fresh and up-to-date.
Originality also means that you (and your coauthors, if any) are the sole creator of each and every element in your post. Any time you rely on someone else’s words, you have to cite and quote them properly, otherwise we consider it an instance of plagiarism. This applies to human authors, of course, but also to AI-generated text. We generally don’t allow any language created by tools like ChatGPT on TDS; if your article discusses these tools and you wish to include 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 example, by using 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 always asking a friend for feedback before publishing your article. Having worked so hard on that article, you wouldn’t want to let a silly mistake push readers away.
15. Has your Medium profile been completed correctly?
Please include your real name, a photo, and a bio. We don’t publish posts from anonymous writers — it’s easier to build trust with readers when they associate your words with an actual person.
Use your profile to introduce yourself, your expertise, your and achievements — optimizing it will help you develop a meaningful relationship with your audience beyond a single post. If you’re not sure what to include in your bio, here are some helpful pointers on how to ensure it’s both effective and compelling.
If you are a company and would like to publish with us, please note that we almost exclusively publish articles submitted from a Medium profile that belongs to a real person.
16. Are you getting better?
Take a minute to reflect on the work you have been doing so far, and the current article you wish to publish. What value are you bringing, and to whom? In which ways are this article better or worse than the ones you previously published?
Longform posts, columns, and online books
Have a lot to say? Good. We love to dive deep into complex topics, and so do our readers. Here’s how you can publish longform posts, columns, and online books on TDS.
Longform posts
We love long reads! If your article’s reading time is shorter than 25 minutes, we recommend that you don’t break it into multiple pieces — keep it as-is. A single post makes it easier for readers to search and find all the information they need, and less likely that they’ll miss an important part of your argument.
To create a smoother reading experience, you can add a table of contents to orient your audience around your post. Adding high-quality images and lots of white space is always a good idea, too — a long text doesn’t have to be a wall of text.
We regularly add the most engaging and thoughtful longform posts to our Deep Dives page.
Columns
If your post’s reading time exceeds 25 minutes, or if you plan to focus on the same topic over multiple articles and a longer stretch of time, you can create your own TDS column. All it takes are three steps:
- Add a custom tag to your post. This tag needs to be unique and reflect the theme of your project. Every time you publish a post with that tag, it will 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.
If you get stuck at any point along the way, please let us know here and we’ll help you create it. If you want to see what columns look like in action, check out Music By Numbers by Callum Ballard and Learn data science while social distancing by Kate Marie Lewis.
You can create a TDS column and invite multiple authors to contribute. Just let your colleague(s) know which tag you decided to use so that they can add the same one to their articles. Here are some examples from our team.
Online Books
A column is a great format to use if you have an open-ended topic that you plan to write about for a while. If, on the other hand, your idea has a finite, defined scope and a clear sense of progression from one post to the next, you may want to create a series of articles that feels more like an online book. Here is the format we recommend using.
Keep the reading time of each article — or “chapter” — between 12 to 25 minutes, and aim for a series that has at least 5 articles (but probably not more than, say, 16). You can add links to previous or subsequent items from within each article — for example, in the introduction and/or conclusion.
To publish your online book, you can submit all your articles to our editorial team in one go, or one by one as you finish working on each. We’ll review them and publish them as they come along, so please add a quick private note to your draft (preferably to your title, where we’re unlikely to miss it) to let us know your post is part of a planned online book project.
Please ensure that each article or online book chapter follows the same guidelines and rules as any other post that TDS publishes. If you ever decide to sell or exclusively license your book to a third party publisher, you will have to make sure you have their consent to continue to publish the book with TDS. If you do not have such consent, it is your responsibility to remove your content from the TDS publication.
How do you submit an article?
To become a writer, please send your article using our form. Please note that we only work on Medium. We don’t proofread articles published on your blog, a PDF, or a Google doc.
We aim to respond to authors as quickly as possible and to let them know whether or not we’ve accepted their articles. On rare occasions, the volume of submissions we receive makes it difficult to respond to everyone; as a general rule, if you haven’t heard from us within a week of submitting your post, it’s safe to assume we won’t move forward with publishing it.
Note: If your most recent post on TDS came out before Jan 1, 2020, please submit your next article via our online form. As TDS grew in recent years, we’ve updated our guidelines and authors’ terms, and you’ll need to review them before publishing your next post with us.
If you’re having an issue with our online form, please let us know via email (publication@towardsdatascience.com) so we can help you complete the process. Please do not email us an article that you have already sent via our form.
Finally, once you have published your first article with us, we will add you to the TDS Medium publication as a contributor and you will be able to submit subsequent articles directly through Medium.
FAQs
- What happens when I submit my article to TDS? ✨
- Can I duplicate a post? Yes if the original article is outside Medium. But don’t duplicate a post that you have already published on Medium.
- Can I write about my company’s products?
- My post has been refused, could you let me know why?
- Can I pay to get published? No
