How to write a scientific paper

The purpose of this essay is to make some self-evident (yet often ignored) remarks about how to write a paper. We argue that the key to writing well is full awareness of the role of papers in the scientific process and full implementation of the principles, derived from this awareness, in the writing process. We also provide some concrete suggestions.

What makes one author a good communicator and another a poor one? What turns out one manuscript a swift editorial task, and another an editorial nightmare? Based on direct experience from the manuscripts of the lectures and papers presented during this school, advice is given on what to do and on what to avoid when writing a scientific paper. Some feedback recommendation is also provided on how to prepare manuscripts, handle copyright and permissions to reproduce, how to anticipate plagiarism, how to deal with editors and referees, and how to avoid common errors. A few illustrations of English grammar and style for the foreign author are given.

ANZ Journal of Surgery, 2013

2008

Abstract. What makes one author a good communicator and another a poor one? What turns out one manuscript a swift editorial task, and another an editorial nightmare? Based on direct experience from the manuscripts of the lectures and papers presented during this school, advice is given on what to do and on what to avoid when writing a scientific paper. Some feedback recommendation is also provided on how to prepare manuscripts, handle copyright and permissions to reproduce, how to anticipate plagiarism, how to deal with editors and referees, and how to avoid common errors. A few illustrations of English grammar and style for the foreign author are given. This meeting is very special in the sense that less than a dozen scientific talks were delivered by senior scientists, whereas 75 % of the papers in this book were presented by PhD students. As the sample of students was expected to show wide variance in research experience, writing skills and capabilities of communication, all stud...

Annals of Forestry, 1993

Help your readers, referees, editor and yourself by careful attention to detail. The summary should be an informative precis of facts and conclusions, not merely a description of the paper. Make the paper easy to read, don't use jargon and have a colleague check it before you submit it to a journal. Use figures rather than tables, and keep the whole paper, including tables and figures, clear, simple and to the point. Consult the journal's' Instructions to contributors' before submitting.

Write with precision, clarity and economy. Every sentence should convey the exact truth as simply as possible." Instructions to Authors Ecology 19 64 ScientiÞc research demands precision. ScientiÞc writing should reßect this precision in the form of clarity. Unfortunately, a glance at almost any scientiÞc journal will reveal that the above-stated ideal is often not attained in the real world of scholarly publication. Indeed, many of the accusations by non-scientiÞsts of "obscurity" and "elitism" within the scientiÞc community probably originate in the sad fact that many scientists are not capable of expressing their hypotheses and conclusions clearly and simply. Fortunately, much of the confusion can be eliminated if writing is considered part of the pretentiousness. In practical terms, the Þrst of those two suggestions implies that as much effort and consideration should be given to the organization of the paper as was given to the execution of the study, and the second implies that the writer should employ crisp sentences not cluttered with excess verbiage. The purpose of this handout is to help you achieve your goals. This argument may seem more compelling if we look at it in terms of dollars. Much is spent to perform research, and the publication is the distillate of that expensive work, all that will survive and communicate what was learned. Moreover, the scientist pays to have papers published, currently $50 per page for many journals. If the content is not clear, the research will be lost, and the money spent to perform it was wasted. If the text is verbose, the author will pay dearly in page charges. Do not consider the following guidelines as unbreakable rules. The particular format and style adopted for a given paper depend upon both the nature of the report and the journal or other publication in which the paper is to be published. For our purposes, we will use the format of Ecology, the publication of the Ecological Society of America; refer to recent issues as models. All journals publish "Instructions to Authors" annually in one of the issues. In other words, there is often more than one "correct" way of doing something, depending on your intentions. However, the practices adopted here are straightforward and intuitively simple. You are advised to become familiar with details of organization, section headings, methods of data presentation, and ways of citing and listing references by examining recent papers in any well-established scientiÞc journal. 1. the purpose of the study (the central question); 2. a brief statement of what was done (Methods); 3. a brief statement of what was found (Results); 4. a brief statement of what was concluded (Discussion, in part).

A scientific paper is a written report describing original research results whose format has been defined by centuries of developing tradition, editorial practice, scientific ethics and the interplay with printing and publishing services. The result of this process is that virtually every scientific paper has a title, abstract, introduction, materials and methods, results and discussion.

European Journal of Translational and Clinical Medicine, 2020

This is Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. This article is an instructive guide on scientific writing and successful publication. It was inspired by professor Zbigniew Wszołek's keynote lecture (presented on May 28, 2019 at the Medical University of Gdańsk) on the subject How to write and publish a scientific paper? How to start writing? When writing the manuscript, one may choose to write in the following order: results, methods and materials, introduction, discussion, conclusion and the abstract. In this way, the author is 'forced' to analyze