How to Format a Scientific Paper?

in scientificwritingcourses •  4 years ago  (edited)

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Scientific articles, such as those found in specialist journals, are often overviews of experiments or other formal research. They follow an established structure based on the standard architecture of the experiments themselves.

Scientific articles, on the other hand, are more relaxed versions of scientific articles in journals that discuss much more about the greater importance of a particular study or group of studies and what makes them interesting.

There are several ways to create an article. (Your publisher chooses how). However, there is only one formula for articles with no actual deviation. I'm going to explain this to you here without going into the philosophy of scientific research. I'm assuming you know why the experiments are designed the way they are. (If you don't know and don't want to, please send me an email.)

Here are the sections.

The effect of X on Y.

G. Doctor and K. Researcher

________________________.

From the Department of Planetary Sciences,

Gudger College and

the Department of Rocketry, University

from Blaupunkt

[First comes a 'summary', the miniature paper is actually the last thing you write. Justify the right margin of this small section.]

Background: Identify the known scientific mechanism you are studying. Next, say what aspect is not yet understood. Propose your mental model that could explain this misunderstood aspect. Say if you are right, doing X will give you Y.

Goal (or 'Goal'): 'Assess whether ... [State your hypothesis]'.

Method (sometimes' method and materials', sometimes' method '):' In a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study, 8 patients (21-35 years of age) received [whatever]. The evaluation was carried out at the start of the study and 14 days after treatment. “You can add a word here about how you managed the stats.

Results: "The evaluation 14 days after the treatment showed a significant ... [condition very briefly]".

Conclusion: "We show for the first time that [X has an influence on Y]".

[Now start the role yourself.]

BACKGROUND (sometimes called INTRODUCTION)

Share what is known about the big problem you are investigating. List all relevant studies.

Share what is missing in all studies so far.

State what you are up to and what you expected, that is, state your hypothesis. It is also a good idea to introduce the null hypothesis. Send me an email if you'd like to define this.

METHOD (sometimes called by other things, remember)

Design: First, describe the design of the study, i.e. double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled or whatever.

Participants: Then describe the group you participated in. Say: “We included 8 patients (6 women, 2 men: age group 21-35 years: mean ± SD; 29 ± 6 years). All patients had the same condition. None of the patients had any other medical conditions or were taking any medication that might affect their response to treatment.

Materials: List everything you used, including questionnaires and brochures. (Blank copies of these copies can be displayed as attachments at the end of the article.)

How to do it: Write exactly what you did, in enough detail so that anyone can duplicate your experiment. This has to be childishly explicit.

Data (or data analysis): indicate how you calculate your numbers. There must be a certain tendency towards centralization and a certain degree of dispersion. Then the studies differ. Most of us just ask statisticians what to do.

Results: Design the raw data. You can do this in the text, but you will also need to include some tabs. After that you can interpret with graphs, although some people like to leave what they conclude from their results for the next section. Graphics are specialized. Make sure you know the definitions of "bar graph" and "histogram" (they are not the same, even if they look the same). Don't use scatterplots (sometimes called scatterplots). They are intended for correlation studies, not for controlled experiments. Pie charts usually only apply to percentage parts of things.

Conclusion: Your judgment, expressed in terms of whether or not your results support your hypothesis. Keep it short.

Discussion: This is the longest and most enjoyable section. Here you protest with your own studies. He points out any weaknesses in his sampling strategy, his handling of variables, his choice of control group strategy, and so on. The idea is to qualify your answer so that no one else can. This, of course, leads to the last paragraph, which usually says that "future studies should consider ..." (what you missed or did wrong).

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