Writing scientific paper is hard, so we need a methodology for that. In the following I will share with you my strategy in writing a scientific paper (from start to finish), hope it will help you too.

Logic is important

Whatever we write, logic is very important. Everything in our writing must have a purpose, so we should get outline first, then try to fill the missing parts. In the following I will introduce the outline that I used.

Outline of the paper

There are several parts of the paper. From the most general sense, a scientific paper must have:

  • Title

The title is the most important part of your paper, it can be just the conclusion of your paper, do not use vague words, use specific word, that you can make your reader spot you from a thousand different papers.

  • Abstract

Abstract is just a snapshot of your main content, you can follow this logic:

(Background) --> (Illustrate the problem) --> (methods) --> (results) --> (conclusion). For each part, use 1-2 sentences. That's enough. The purpose is to let the reader know the most important information of your paper after reading your abstract. Do not make it really long. It's not worth it.

  • Main Content
  • References
  • Acknowledgements
  • (Supporting Information)

The logic of the main content is summarized in below:

  • Introduction

In introduction part, we will answer these questions:

(1) What is the background of your study?

(2) What is the specific question that you want to answer?

(3) Are there any answers provided before? What do they lack? Why do you want to study again?

(4) What is your strategy for studying this phenomena?

(5) What is your plan for the whole paper

  • Methods

Just write your methods so that people can follow your "recipe" and repeat exactly what you did, do not overthink it.

  • Results & Discussion

The results and discussion part start with your conclusion. Then you can divide your conclusion into arguments, like this:

  • Conclusion
    • Argument 1
    • Argument 2
    • ......
    • Argument N

For each argument, you have different results, the results could be tables and figures (most common 2 types of data), so that you can write it as:

  • Argument
    • Results 1
    • Results 2
    • Results 3
    • ......
    • Results N

Usually we only have 1 or 2 results for each argument, but we show here is something in general, so you could this about this \(N\) as 1 or 2.

Now we can move to the results part, for each results, the hierarchy is:

  • Result
    • Caption
    • Elaboration
    • Comparison
      • Expr.
        • State the difference
        • Explain the difference
        • What results can we say?
      • Theo.
        • State the difference
        • Explain the difference
        • What results can we say?

The caption and elaboration are considered as the "results", and the comparison is considered as the "discussion" part. For the discussion, it is really important to compare with other people's work, then we can state the difference, and explain why this difference happens and what can we do in the future to resolve those conflictions.

In actual writing, we divided this section with different arguments, then we use subtitles for each results, and inside each subtitles we explain in detail about what we have and what those data means, also the comparison with other work. So the whole structure can be illustrated in below (I only draw one example):

  • Conclusion
    • Argument 1
      • Result 1
        • Caption
        • Elaboration
        • Comparison
          • Expr.
            • State the difference
            • Explain the difference
            • How to prevent this difference in the future
          • Theor.
      • Result 2
      • ......
      • Result N
    • Argument 2
    • ......
    • Argument N
  • Conclusion

The conclusion of our paper must be stated in bullet points in the end, this will help reader see clearly about what we have accomplished in the paper and use the last paragraph to illustrate some future directions that might be useful and important for future studies.

After you have gather all the informations, now you have a first draft, make them in coherent form and you can start edit it.

We will talk about editing later.

I hope you can learn something from this post.

I'll see you in the next one. Take care everyone, byebye!

Best,

Zhengda