Getting a paper published in a respected scientific journal can be an exhilarating opportunity for researchers to contribute to their fields, but it’s often a patience-testing exercise in rejection, rewriting and waiting. In this short by the French filmmaker Charlotte Arene, the physicists Frédéric Restagno and Julien Bobroff, both of the University of Paris-Saclay, offer surprisingly amusing accounts of their own experiences of the ‘letter’, the most common format for publishing research in physics. With Arene providing jaunty stop-motion visuals, The Researcher’s Article is an enlightening and lively paean to the process of adding a small drop to the well of scientific knowledge.