Writing Scientific Papers
Writing scientific papers is an important part of conducting scientific research.
You need to publish your results, as a scientific paper in an academic journal, for anyone else to know that you did the research work. You need the published papers to enhance your career and reputation.
You haven’t finished your piece of scientific research until you’ve written the scientific paper.
Scientific papers follow the format of:
This format should be used as it helps the readers of your paper follow your arguments and it’s what everyone is used to, so any changes will just distract them from the information you’re presenting.
Purpose of Scientific Papers
Scientific papers should be written to be read by other scientist. That is other people with a similar level of knowledge as you. You don’t need to include extensive back ground material or explanations of methods.
The whole purpose of writing scientific papers is to communicate the results you obtained and conclusions you were able to draw from them. So include the minimal amount of background material and explanation in the introduction. The materials and methods section should just include the basic amount of detail needed for someone to repeat your experiments. If you’ve used a published method, reference it and only detail any changes made. If someone wants to know the details they can look them up.
The results section, discussion of the results and the conclusions that you draw are the really important parts and are why you wrote the scientific paper.
Spend time presenting your results in the best way possible. Produce the best, clearest tables and figures that you can. Then write a good detailed discussion and draw conclusions that relate to your aims which you presented at the end of the introduction section.
Publishing Scientific Papers
After writing scientific papers you need to publish your scientific papers.
It’s often a good idea to decide which journal you’d like to publish in before starting to write the paper, as this might affect the formatting and style. Each journal has its own set of style guidelines that you’ll need to follow.
When writing your paper for academic journals you’ll need to use academic and scientific writing styles, such as the passive voice. See the writing help and academic writing sections of this site for more details.
There’s a lot of competition to be publish in good journals. Journals receive more papers than they have space to publish in each issue. This means that your paper needs to be as good as possible. This includes the contents (results) as well as the way that they’re presented (language).
To help increase the chances of your paper being accepted you’ll need to proofread your writing to make sure that the grammar, spelling and structure is perfect. There are articles about proofreading your own document in the proofreading section as well as lists of tips and techniques to help you proofread.
If you need help proofread your paper before submitting it, I can do this. See the page about me to find my academic qualifications. I specialize in academic and scientific proofreading. See the page about my proofreading service for more information or contact me to ask me any questions.
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