Transcript
Putting together a scientific paper from scratch can be very daunting. The first few times, it’s easy to get bogged down in the details or to have difficulty knowing where to start. This video will give you a few tips to make the process easier.
While this advice applies to most of the sciences, the structure and content of scientific papers vary significantly between fields. This advice is being given with the biological and environmental fields in mind, and it’s not an exhaustive list of steps for preparing a manuscript, but hopefully it will get you on your way to publishing your research. The very first step is to select your target journal. There are lots of rules on structure and format specific to each journal; the length of the article, the number of figures and tables allowed, the amount of detail expected in the introduction, and the location of the method section, for example.
There are also rules regarding which referencing system to follow and how to format the article correctly for submission. It’s crucial to know these rules from the outset, read over the instructions or submission guidelines for authors for your chosen journal and familiarize yourself with their rules. It’s much easier to follow these from the beginning when writing your first draft, rather than engaging in a lengthy edit of the format, layout and length of your journal article at the very end. It’s also important to consider the scope of your selected journal and ensure that your study complies with the journal’s key focus areas. If it doesn’t, your article is likely to be rejected without review and may require extensive reworking prior to being submitted to a different journal.
Even though impact factor is no longer the only metric for ranking journals, it is still important to consider the caliber of the journal you are submitting to. Aim high, but make sure your study is appropriate for the journal in terms of impact, interest to the readership and themes. The last thing you want is to waste the editor’s time and yours .
Naturally, it’s important to have done an extensive review of the literature before you start your research, but don’t make the mistake of writing the abstract or introduction of your article first. While the introduction may seem like the easiest place to start, it depends strongly on your results and conclusions and can therefore change during the development of your general article.
You may find a simpler interpretation of your results or decide to add extra analysis halfway through writing your paper, which could completely change its scope. So it’s best to leave the writing of the introduction until the end. One thing you should do early on, while you’re still researching and before you begin writing is making a bullet point introduction. You can make a note of the major themes your article will cover and include lots of subheadings and statements with references. These bullet points are much easier to rearrange than a full introduction and will enable you to keep track of any useful references and the statements they support.
When it finally comes to writing your introduction, you’ll have all the points you need, and you can pick the themes that best relate to your research and your chosen journal. Now let’s focus on your results. Your finalized results, including all of the figures and tables that you’d like to include, form the basis of your article. Figures present your data in an organized and easy to understand manner, as well as reducing your word count, which is important for journals that have a low word limit. One wellmade figure is vastly preferable to a large paragraph of text.
Just remember not to double up by presenting data in both a figure and in a text. It’s recommended that you present the most exciting results of your study in your figures because they are normally the first or second thing that a reader and a reviewer will look at. While it’s tempting to show the readers every little bit of data that you’ve collected, a paper does not always have to do so, and in fact, it will rarely include all the results from your experiments. This does not mean cherry picking data to support a particular result or outcome, but rather being selective of the results included in your journal article. You should include all of the results that are relevant to your story, but exclude anything that doesn’t help to explain your findings.
When writing, think of it like telling a story. A journal article is essentially an exercise in storytelling and should thus be as clear and easy to follow as possible. Keep your sentences short and concise, avoid complicated language, and try to make your ideas flow logically. Starting each paragraph with a topic sentence a sentence that outlines what you’ll cover in the paragraph greatly AIDS the.
Flow of your writing and will help you to stay on track by encouraging you to only include information that relates to this theme. To help you create a clear and cohesive story, create a separate reference, document or plan that includes a summary of your results, three to five main points, and a short list of the implications of these results. This summary may well form part of your abstract once you finish the rest of your paper are by referring to it at different stages during your writing, you’ll ensure that you stay on topic and that you’re addressing all of the central topics in your discussion and introduction. Now let’s talk about the methods section. You will probably have the majority of your methods section written in some form already for example, from your research proposal, a grant application, or from your planning stages.
Therefore, the majority of the work for this section will be ensuring that the tense is correct, that all relevant information is included, and that the flow is easy to follow. It’s often helpful to use the last paragraph of the methods to describe the statistical analysis you used without actually stating any of the results. This ensures the reader knows how you produced your results and sets the stage for the reporting of the analyses. In your results section, have your result summary on hand to ensure that you only include the methods of the experiments included in your journal article. Some journals put the methods at the end of the article, in which case don’t include any information in the methods that’s essential for the interpretation of the results.
Instead, present this information before your results. As the methods are a relatively simple component of the article, it can be useful to save this part of the writing for a time when you’re feeling overwhelmed by the rest of the task or if you feel you’re getting writer’s block. Getting stuck into the methods at this time means you can continue to make progress and help you feel more in control of the writing process. Next, you can move on to writing the discussion. The first paragraph of the discussion is normally a brief summary of the most important results of your study and how they fit into the broader literature in your field.
The following paragraphs then explain your results in the context of the literature. For example, you can start with a paragraph with a description of the result and then explore why you think this occurred, using examples from other studies to back up your ideas. Aim to discuss only one result per paragraph and, depending on the length of the article, limit the discussion to three or four themes that best explain your results. If your paper requires more than four themes, it may be worth splitting these across multiple journal articles. Once you have a wellformed argument around the themes that best explain your results, you can start thinking about how to present these themes in the introduction.
If you followed my earlier advice, you’ll have a list style introduction with the themes of your research and the important references already. Go through this list and select the themes that you covered in your discussion. When it comes to structure, a formula that is often followed in biological journal articles is start with a very broad background paragraph, then two to three paragraphs describing previous work relating to your themes, then a paragraph explaining your study system and or study organisms, and finish with a paragraph outlining the aims and hypothesis. This last paragraph should not read like the methods, but should give the reader an idea of all the key experiments undertaken for this study. Once your final draft is finished, you’re on the home stretch, but the process of submitting a paper can take longer than you think.
In addition to your journal article tables and figures which often need to meet very specific requirements and supplementary material, you’ll also often need a cover letter, all of the affiliations of your coauthors and their funding details, sometimes up to three suggested reviewers, and often a statement outlining why you’ve chosen to submit this article to this particular journal. Many journals will also ask you to provide your raw data or analyses as supplementary material or in an online data repository. These final steps are demanding the first few times you submit a journal article, but take the time to do them well. The information you submit along with your paper influences the editor’s decision to send your paper out for review. This is very important considering that many journals reject more than 50% of submitted manuscripts before the review stage.
A cover letter is a short, less than one page letter to the editor or editors that helps them decide whether your paper is suited for the journal. Start with a statement such as Please accept the submission of our or my manuscript entitled insert your title here for consideration for the publication in the name of the journal. In the second section, make the most important findings of your study as clear as possible. Say why your research is original and how it adds to the knowledge in your field. It’s also important to emphasize why the readers of this particular journal would be interested in your study.
It can be helpful to request some recent cover letters from your supervisor in order to get an idea of the content required in your field. And that brings you to the end of the process of submitting your first scientific journal article. In terms of improving your skills over time, learning to critique journal articles is often an excellent way to improve your own writing skills. It makes it easier to stand in the reviewer’s shoes and look at your own paper with a critical eye to detect any details that may need refinement. A great way to gain experience as a reviewer is to ask your supervisor if they have any papers you could review or ask if you can look at any reviewer comments that may have been written or received.
Supervisors will normally jump at the opportunity to pass on some reviewing duties. And one final piece of advice make a collection of well written papers in your field to refer to when you’re unsure how to structure your paper. Simply reading through these articles is a good way to get inspiration and help guide you to the way you’d like your paper to read. I really hope you found this video useful. If you have, please do like it and share it with your friends and colleagues.
