How to write a Research Paper

By -

This is a summary of the lecture [1], which I think will be helpful for undergraduates like me to publish their research work.

Outline

  • Scholarly publishing overview
  • What to publish
  • Select your journal/readers/audience carefully
  • Typical article structure

Scholarly publishing overview

Steps of publishing overview are
  • Solicit and manage submissions
    • Papers come in and editors process them and decide whether they suitable for peer-reviewing.
  • Manage peer review
  • Edit and prepare
  • Production
  • Publish and Disseminate

What to publish

Researches may publish papers for
  • Graduation
  • Get funding
  • Get promoted
  • Or other

But these reasons will not consider when editors, reviewers, and research community are assessing those. They only focus on the content.  Readers read papers to get something out of it for their research team and to find interesting conclusions, discussions, figures, etc. They don't read for joy. So, when writing papers we must keep this on our mind.


Researchers can publish
  • Novel methodologies
  • Reviews on a subject
  • Advance knowledge in a certain scientific field
 Researchers should not publish
  • Out of date work
  • Non-scientific work
  • Duplicated work
  • Wrong conclusions

The manuscript can be defined as unpublished work. After publishing it is known as a paper. A good manuscript should contain
  • Good content that is useful, novel, clear, and exciting.
  • A good presentation of content that is clear and logically constructed. The content should be clearly explained. If not the good content can be useless. It should be constructed in order. Typically starting with explaining the problem? Next, explain what you did? what you found? what are the results and possible improvements?  in order.
  • Emphasize the significant foundings or written in a way that reviewers and editors can easily grab your significant founding. Emphasize those in every possible part of the paper.

Before starting the research you should do research on published papers. Simple, you should check whether your research idea is implemented by someone already. For these tools such as SCOPUS, WoS, Google Scholar, PubMed can be used.

Select your journal/readers/audience carefully

When selecting a Journal
  • Identify the audience for your paper. Identify their interests. You can seek advice from the university library team, supervisor, or colleagues on where to publish. Another option is the Elsevier Journal Finder which uses AI technology.
  • Think of the readers' needs. Select the journal that readers of your field lookup to find research papers. It could be the journal that includes most of your citations. Think about who is the journal's audience? Is it, software engineers or chemists.
  • Review recent publications in each candidate journal and find out hot topics, the accepted types of articles, readership, etc.
  • Read the 'Guide to Authors' of the journal carefully. It may include text layout, how to include figures and tables, references, etc.
  • Do not submit more than one journal at a time. Submit in a sequence. As an example, make an order of journals that you prefer to submit. Then, Submit for the first journal you selected, and if it does not work out submit to the next one.

Bibliometrics indicators are used to measure the quality of your research paper. Those are,
  • Impact factor
    • "The average annual number of citations per article published.[1]"
  • CiteScore
  • SJR
  • SNIP
  • H-Index, etc.

Common problems with submissions according to Paul Haddad, Editor, Journal of Chromatography A.
These points are quotes from the lecture [1].
  • Submission of papers which are clearly out of scope
  • Failure to format the paper according to the Guide for Authors
  • Inappropriate suggested reviewers
  • Inadequate response to reviewers
  • Inadequate standard of English
  • Resubmission of rejected manuscripts without revision
When writing papers, language, and grammar are so important. It is not like writing English literature. The papers should be written in scientific language using short and clear sentences. A simple guide on sentence length is that a sentence should be shorter enough that you can read a full sentence without a pause[1]. Avoid multiple statements in one sentence[1]. Typically, the introduction should be written in past tense or present tense depending on your context. The methodology should be written in the past tense. Results should be in the past tense. Discussion in the present tense, and the conclusion and application in the present and future tense. It is important to check the Guide for Authors of your target journal for language specifications. As an example, some journals may prefer British spelling over the American spelling. If you have a choice it is better to select  American spelling because most of the people use American spelling.

Authorship
The first author should be the leader of the project or the person who did the most work. The other contributions should be co-authors.

Mendeley
"Mendeley is a reference manager and a workflow tool supporting researcher needs.[1]"
Mendeley data can be used to host your dataset.

Typical article structure

Typical Structure of a Research Article is [1]:
  • Head -  Used for Indexing, and Searching - Should Informative, Attractive, Effective.
    • Title
    • Abstract
    • Keywords
  • Main Text - IMRAD - Body - Should be concise
    • I - Introduction
    • M - Methods
    • R - Results
    • A - And
    • D - Discussions
  • Tail
    • Conclusion
    • Acknowledgment
    • References
    • Supplementary Data
When writing the paper think of it as building a wall.
  1. First, you could represent your DATA such as FIGURES/TABLES.
  2. Based on the data describe the METHODS.
  3. Then show your RESULTS and DISCUSS THOSE RESULTS ( DISCUSSION).
  4. Then write the CONCLUSION.
  5. Next. the INTRODUCTION.
  6. Finally TITLE and ABSTRACT.
TITLE
  • "A good title should contain the fewest possible words at adequately describe the contents of a paper" [1].
  • Should begin with the subject of the paper.
  • Should be complete and unambiguous.
  • Should not contain rarely-used abbreviations
  • Should attract readers
A good example of a title is "Why females live more than men?"[1].

KEYWORDS

Keywords should not be too general (eg:-drug delivery) neither too narrow. Nobody will search for narrow keywords.
An effective approach is looking at the keywords of the related articles. And search these keywords in a search engine and find whether they return relevant articles.

ABSTRACT

Should be one paragraph and the word count should be between 50-250.
"Advertisement for your article"[1].
Should encourage the reader to read the rest of the paper.

INTRODUCTION
  • Like fuelling, You have to mention where the field or research area is and how your work fits into that. You have to go from the general idea to the specific details of your work. You have to mention where is your work going to be among others' work. 
  • "The place to convince readers that you know why your work is relevant, also for them"[1].
  • Should be brief.
  • Should not mix with results, discussion, and conclusions. Keep them separate.
  • Should not brag about the work. Should not overuse words such as "novel", "first-ever", etc.
Should answer the following questions[1]:
  • What is the problem?
  • Are there any existing solutions?
  • Which one is the best?
  • What is it's main limitation?
  • What do you hope to achieve?
    • Should be matched with conclusion and discussion

METHODS / EXPERIMENTAL
  • Should include all important details in a way that the reader can replicate the work. Details that were previously published can be omitted but should have a summary of those experiments.
  • Should provide equipment vendor names that you used.
  • Should write in the past tense. Most journals prefer passive voice and some active.
  • Can use supplementary materials such as documents, spreadsheets, audio, video, etc.
RESULTS
  • Like an ice burg. Only important findings should be presented to the user. This makes it easier to grab the important points with less time by the reader. Should present the results form the experiments mentioned in the methods section.
  • Highlight the novel findings from the previous publications and unexpected findings.
  • Should show the results of the statistical analysis.
  • Better to include figures and tables. Captions and tables should be detailed enough to make figures and tables self-explanatory. Do not need further explanation in the text. But this could differ from journal to journal.
  • Can use un-crowded plots. Should pay attention to scales, axis labels, and its size, clarity of symbols. Can use different shapes or line styles rather than colors to differentiate.
DISCUSSION
  • Most important section. SELL your data or findings in this section.
  • Describe what do your results mean. Should discuss each and every result. If illustrated if there are 6 results you should describe all of those 6.
  • Should relate to the original question or objectives mentioned in the introduction.
  • Could answer the question "Are your results consistent with what other investigators have reported? Or are there any differences? Why?"[1].
  • Should mention any limitations if there.
  • Should not make statements that go beyond what the results can support
  • Should not suddenly introduce new terms
CONCLUSIONS
  • Should include specific conclusions
  • Can indicate where the field is heading with your findings
  • Can include uses of the findings
  • Should not summarize the paper. Do it in the abstract.
  • Should not include judgments about the impact. Other researchers will do it for you.
REFERENCES
  • Use References management software.
    • eg:- MENDELEY, Zotero, BibSonomy, etc.
  • Check the referencing style of the journal.

What leads to the acceptance of the paper?

According to the Nigel John Cook the, the Editor-in-Cheif, "Ore Geology Reviews", the points leads to acceptance are,
  • Attention to details
  • Check and double-check your work
  • Consider the reviewer's comments
  • English must be good as possible
  • Presentation is important
  • Take your time with revision
  • Acknowledge those who have helped you
  • New, original and previously unpublished
  • Critically evaluate your own manuscript
  • Ethical rules must be obeyed
References
[1] How to write a great scientific paper, and have it published in a good journal: A Video Lecturer by Anthony Newman, Senior Publisher, Elsevier. Produced by Elsevier.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Getting started with GIT – Part 3

By -
This is the part 3 of tutorial getting started with git. Now let’s see how to delete files. We can use “ git rm <files name> ” command to delete files. Let’s commit the changes we made. Note: Here, you may notice that we did not add our changes to staging area. That is because when we use “git rm” command, it already adds the deleted file to the staging are. Let’s learn how to rename and move files. First, we are going to rename a file as we normally do. I am going to rename the “first.txt” file into “index.txt”. Let’s see what git thinks about the renaming we did. You can see git thinks that we deleted the first.txt file and added another file called index. So, we can act according to git. Now we are going to add the index.txt file and remove the first.txt file. If we check the status now using “ git status ”, you will notice that git has realized what we actually did was renaming the file. As always commi...
Read more

Getting started with GIT – Part 2

By -
Welcome to the part 2 of tutorial getting started with git. In the part one we had a one text file in our project. So, let’s create some new files. Now enter the status command. You can see it says that you have untracked files. Here, untracked means we did not commit them, and git does not keep track on changes done to those files. So, in order git to keep track of our files we need to commit them. Earlier in the part 1, we add all the files using “ git add . ” command. Now we are going to add files one by one. Now let’s enter the status command. We still did not commit the "second.txt" file. So, you can see it is there in the changes to be committed area. That is the staging area. Staging area is a place between your working copy and the core repository. Whenever we execute the add command on a file, that file goes to the staging area. The staging area includes the files that are ready to get committed. Whenever y...
Read more

Getting started with GIT – Part 5

By -
This is the 5th part of the getting started with GIT tutorial series. Here we will explorer some most important functions of GIT. This is a continuation from the last part "Getting started with GIT – Part 4 ". Lets see how to get old version of our project. First I am going to view all my commits using “ git log ” command. Currently my website looks like this. Now I am going add another main content area to my website. And commit those changes to the repository. And again, I am going to add another(fourth) main content are to my website and commit those changes. Now let’s check our git log. Now website looks like this. So, we assume we only need 3 main content blocks and we want to go back to the commit where we had only 3 main content blocks. We can achieve it by checkout the version with only 3 content areas. So, we can use command “ git checkout <commit number> -- <the file name> ”. So,...
Read more