Writing science research paper

Readers of this handout may also find our handout on writing in the sciences useful. You did an experiment or study for your science class, and now you have to write it up for your teacher to review. You feel that you understood the background sufficiently, designed and completed the study effectively, obtained useful data, and can use those data to draw conclusions about a scientific process or principle. But how exactly do you write all that?

HOW TO WRITE A SCIENTIFIC ARTICLE

The purpose of this invited commentary is to offer practical suggestions for achieving success when writing and submitting manuscripts to The International Journal of Sports Physical Therapy and other professional journals.

Conducting scientific and clinical research is only the beginning of the scholarship of discovery. In order for the results of research to be accessible to other professionals and have a potential effect on the greater scientific community, it must be written and published. Following this review the manuscript is recommended for publication, revision or rejection. Furthermore, peer review manuscript publication systems requiring these technical writing skills can be developed and improved with practice.

Clear communication of the findings of research is essential to the growth and development of science 3 and professional practice. The culmination of the publication process provides not only satisfaction for the researcher and protection of intellectual property, but also the important function of dissemination of research results, new ideas, and alternate thought; which ultimately facilitates scholarly discourse.

Failure to publish important findings significantly diminishes the potential impact that those findings may have on clinical practice.

To begin it might be interesting to learn why reviewers accept manuscripts! Reviewers consider the following five criteria to be the most important in decisions about whether to accept manuscripts for publication: 1 the importance, timeliness, relevance, and prevalence of the problem addressed; 2 the quality of the writing style i. When you begin writing about your research, begin with a specific target journal in mind.

The IJSPT seeks to provide readership with current information to enhance the practice of sports physical therapy. Therefore the manuscript categories accepted by IJSPT include: Original research; Systematic reviews of literature; Clinical commentary and Current concept reviews; Case reports; Clinical suggestions and unique practice techniques; and Technical notes.

Once a decision has been made to write a manuscript, compose an outline that complies with the requirements of the target submission journal and has each of the suggested sections. This means carefully checking the submission criteria and preparing your paper in the exact format of the journal to which you intend to submit. Be thoughtful about the distinction between content what you are reporting and structure where it goes in the manuscript.

Poor placement of content confuses the reader reviewer and may cause misinterpretation of content. It may be helpful to follow the IMRaD format for writing scientific manuscripts. This acronym stands for the sections contained within the article: Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion. Each of these areas of the manuscript will be addressed in this commentary. Typically the last two portions to be written are the conclusion and the abstract. Accurate and clear expression of your thoughts and research information should be the primary goal of scientific writing.

Contain your literature review, ideas, and discussions to your topic, theme, model, review, commentary, or case. Avoid vague terminology and too much prose. Use short rather than long sentences. If jargon has to be utilized keep it to a minimum and explain the terms you do use clearly.

Write with a measure of formality, using scientific language and avoiding conjunctions, slang, and discipline or regionally specific nomenclature or terms e. Avoid first person language and instead write using third person language.

Some journals do not ascribe to this requirement, and allow first person references, however, IJSPT prefers use of third person. Problems such as improper use of grammar, tense, and spelling are often a cause of rejection by reviewers. Despite the content of the study these easily fixed errors suggest that the authors created the manuscript with less thought leading reviewers to think that the manuscript may also potentially have erroneous findings as well.

A review from a second set of trained eyes will often catch these errors missed by the original authors. If English is not your first language, the editorial staff at IJSPT suggests that you consult with someone with the relevant expertise to give you guidance on English writing conventions, verb tense, and grammar. Excellent writing in English is hard, even for those of us for whom it is our first language! Use figures and graphics to your advantage.

Tables should be able to stand alone and be completely understandable at a quick glance. Understanding a table should not require careful review of the manuscript! Figures dramatically enhance the graphic appeal of a scientific paper.

Many formats for graphic presentation are acceptable, including graphs, charts, tables, and pictures or videos. Photographs should be clear, free of clutter or extraneous background distractions and be taken with models wearing simple clothing. Color photographs are preferred. Digital figures Scans or existing files as well as new photographs must be at least dpi. All photographs should be provided as separate files jpeg or tif preferred and not be embedded in the paper.

Quality and clarity of figures are essential for reproduction purposes and should be considered before taking images for the manuscript. A video of an exercise or procedure speaks a thousand words. Please consider using short video clips as descriptive additions to your paper. Maximum cumulative length of videos is 5 minutes. Each video segment may not exceed 50 MB, and each video clip must be saved as a separate file and clearly identified.

Carefully consider placement of, naming of, and location of figures. It makes the job of the editors much easier! Avoid Plagiarism and inadvertent lack of citations. Finally, use citations to your benefit. Cite frequently in order to avoid any plagiarism. The bottom line: If it is not your original idea, give credit where credit is due. When using direct quotations, provide not only the number of the citation, but the page where the quote was found.

All citations should appear in text as a superscripted number followed by punctuation. It is the authors' responsibility to fully ensure all references are cited in completed form, in an accurate location.

Please carefully follow the instructions for citations and check that all references in your reference list are cited in the paper and that all citations in the paper appear correctly in the reference list. Sometimes written as an afterthought, the abstract is of extreme importance as in many instances this section is what is initially previewed by readership to determine if the remainder of the article is worth reading.

This is the authors opportunity to draw the reader into the study and entice them to read the rest of the article. The abstract is a summary of the article or study written in 3 rd person allowing the readers to get a quick glance of what the contents of the article include. Writing an abstract is rather challenging as being brief, accurate and concise are requisite.

The headings and structure for an abstract are usually provided in the instructions for authors. In some instances, the abstract may change slightly pending content revisions required during the peer review process. Therefore it often works well to complete this portion of the manuscript last. Remember the abstract should be able to stand alone and should be as succinct as possible. The introduction is one of the more difficult portions of the manuscript to write.

Past studies are used to set the stage or provide the reader with information regarding the necessity of the represented project. For an introduction to work properly, the reader must feel that the research question is clear, concise, and worthy of study.

Don't reach or include too broad of a literature review. For example, do not include extraneous information about performance or prevention if your research does not actually address those things. The literature review of a scientific paper is not an exhaustive review of all available knowledge in a given field of study. That type of thorough review should be left to review articles or textbook chapters.

Throughout the introduction and later in the discussion! Conclude your introduction with a solid statement of your purpose s and your hypothesis es , as appropriate. The purpose and objectives should clearly relate to the information gap associated with the given manuscript topic discussed earlier in the introduction section.

The methods section should clearly describe the specific design of the study and provide clear and concise description of the procedures that were performed. The purpose of sufficient detail in the methods section is so that an appropriately trained person would be able to replicate your experiments. To assist in writing and manuscript preparation there are several checklists or guidelines that are available on the IJSPT website. Initially a brief paragraph should explain the overall procedures and study design.

Within this first paragraph there is generally a description of inclusion and exclusion criteria which help the reader understand the population used. Paragraphs that follow should describe in more detail the procedures followed for the study. A clear description of how data was gathered is also helpful. For example were data gathered prospectively or retrospectively?

Who if anyone was blinded, and where and when was the actual data collected? Although it is a good idea for the authors to have justification and a rationale for their procedures, these should be saved for inclusion into the discussion section, not to be discussed in the methods section. However, occasionally studies supporting components of the methods section such as reliability of tests, or validation of outcome measures may be included in the methods section.

The final portion of the methods section will include the statistical methods used to analyze the data. In most journals the results section is separate from the discussion section. It is important that you clearly distinguish your results from your discussion.

The results section should describe the results only. The discussion section should put those results into a broader context. Again, be thoughtful about content and structure.

Think carefully about where content is placed in the overall structure of your paper. It is not appropriate to bring up additional results, not discussed in the results section, in the discussion.

Thus, the discussion should not simply be a repeat of the results section. Carefully discuss where your information is similar or different from other published evidence and why this might be so.

What was different in methods or analysis, what was similar? As previously stated, stick to your topic at hand, and do not overstretch your discussion!

For first-time authors, the prospect of writing their very own scientific research article may be both exciting and overwhelming. Faced with a mountain of data. For a research article, perform a thorough literature search on a credible search engine (e.g., Web of Science, Google Scholar). Ask the following.

Open Science. Research Intelligence. Research Community. Your Career.

Scientific experiments are demanding, exciting endeavors, but, to have an impact, results must be communicated to others. A research paper is a method of communication, an attempt to tell others about some specific data that you have gathered and what you think those data mean in the context of your research.

For first-time authors, the prospect of writing their very own scientific research article may be both exciting and overwhelming. Faced with a mountain of data, notes, and other remnants of the research process, it may be difficult to figure out where and how to begin the manuscript writing process. However, if the research has been done well and the topic is appropriate for classroom submission or journal publication, authors will be off to a good start by approaching the writing process in a methodical way.

Writing a Scientific Paper: INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this invited commentary is to offer practical suggestions for achieving success when writing and submitting manuscripts to The International Journal of Sports Physical Therapy and other professional journals. Conducting scientific and clinical research is only the beginning of the scholarship of discovery. In order for the results of research to be accessible to other professionals and have a potential effect on the greater scientific community, it must be written and published. Following this review the manuscript is recommended for publication, revision or rejection. Furthermore, peer review manuscript publication systems requiring these technical writing skills can be developed and improved with practice.

Scientific Reports

It is important to cite sources in the introduction section of your paper as evidence of the claims you are making. There are ways of citing sources in the text so that the reader can find the full reference in the literature cited section at the end of the paper, yet the flow of the reading is not badly interrupted. However, if there are more than two authors, the last name of the 1st author is given followed by the abbreviation et al. This is where you describe briefly and clearly why you are writing the paper. The introduction supplies sufficient background information for the reader to understand and evaluate the experiment you did. It also supplies a rationale for the study. For more information, please Click here. Software VPN is not available for guests, so they may not have access to some content when connecting from off-campus. Hours Accessibility Accounts Giving.

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The scientific format may seem confusing for the beginning science writer due to its rigid structure which is so different from writing in the humanities. One reason for using this format is that it is a means of efficiently communicating scientific findings to the broad community of scientists in a uniform manner. Another reason, perhaps more important than the first, is that this format allows the paper to be read at several different levels.

11 steps to structuring a science paper editors will take seriously

Format for the paper Edit your paper! Useful books. Scientific research articles provide a method for scientists to communicate with other scientists about the results of their research. A standard format is used for these articles, in which the author presents the research in an orderly, logical manner. This doesn't necessarily reflect the order in which you did or thought about the work. This format is:. The person who did the work and wrote the paper is generally listed as the first author of a research paper. For published articles, other people who made substantial contributions to the work are also listed as authors. An abstract, or summary, is published together with a research article, giving the reader a "preview" of what's to come. Such abstracts may also be published separately in bibliographical sources, such as Biologic al Abstracts.

A good peer review requires disciplinary expertise, a keen and critical eye, and a diplomatic and constructive approach. As junior scientists develop their expertise and make names for themselves, they are increasingly likely to receive invitations to review research manuscripts. Writing a good review requires expertise in the field, an intimate knowledge of research methods, a critical mind, the ability to give fair and constructive feedback, and sensitivity to the feelings of authors on the receiving end. As a range of institutions and organizations around the world celebrate the essential role of peer review in upholding the quality of published research this week, Science Careers shares collected insights and advice about how to review papers from researchers across the spectrum. The responses have been edited for clarity and brevity. I am very open-minded when it comes to accepting invitations to review.