How to Set Up a Scientific Research Paper
By Karen Blair, eHow Contributor
The key to writing a successful scientific paper that will have a good chance of being published in the journal of your choice is to set it up for success from the beginning. Following an outline that conforms to industry standards is an excellent way to get started on the path to publication. Although each subject area will have its own spin on the format for a scientific paper, the majority of papers will include the following elements: abstract, literature review, method, results and discussion.
Instructions on Abstract and Introduction
1
Write an abstract of your paper that is approximately 100 to 300 words. Your abstract should be a brief summary of your paper and include its purpose, execution and results. Your abstract helps to tell readers if your paper is something that they should read and whether or not it may be relevant to their own work.
2
Introduce your paper with a paragraph that is interesting and grabs the reader's attention. Your introductory paragraph should start out broadly and quickly narrow so that by the end of this paragraph your reader knows what your study is about, roughly how you conducted it and possibly even what you found. Unlike a good fiction novel, a scientific paper should not be a suspenseful piece of writing. Your reader wants to quickly learn what you have found, and you want to present this information as concisely and clearly as possible.
3
Provide a thorough review of the existing literature that is relevant to the study you are presenting in your paper. Highlight the strengths and weaknesses of past research and explain how your study fills in the gaps and adds new information to the field or provides answers to important questions.
4
Describe the purpose of the current study by connecting it to the previous research and providing the rationale for the study. Include a brief summary of the study's method and describe any hypotheses, major thesis statements or arguments that you plan to present within the paper.
Method
5
Provide your reader with a description of your participants, or research sample. Your reader needs to know the size of your sample, the characteristics of your sample and how you selected your sample.
6
List the materials that were used in your study. Perhaps you had participants complete a series of questionnaires; if so, provide information about each questionnaire, example items and statistical measures of reliability and validity.
7
Describe the exact procedures used in your study. The goal of the Procedures section is to allow other researchers to replicate your research. Provide enough information that would allow another researcher to feasibly conduct the same study. Answer these questions: In what order did events occur? How did participants find out about the study? What were the exact conditions under which you executed each condition of your experiment?
Results
8
Summarize your data analysis strategy. Although a data analysis summary is not always a part of all forms of scientific papers, they can be very helpful in orienting your readers to what they are about to encounter in the remainder of the results section. Explain the various data analysis techniques used, and be sure to provide additional detail about any type of analysis with which readers may have less familiarity.
9
Present the results of your data analysis (or the results of your study) as concisely and clearly as possible. It is important to make this section as easy to follow as possible, as it is likely to contain the most complicated information. If you set out a series of hypotheses in your introduction, it may be helpful to remind your reader about these hypotheses and use each one as a subheading for the results that relate to each hypothesis.
10
Use tables and graphs to help elaborate on your important results. Often, a picture truly can be worth a thousand words, and when word counts are limited, as they often are for journal articles, it can be very helpful to provide a table or graph that illuminates an important finding. Refer to the table or graph in the text of your paper so that the reader has the proper context to understand what your table or graph is presenting.