How to write a scientific paper--a rough guide to getting published.

Abstract

Few professional experiences are more depressing than having your first attempt at writing an original article rejected.The process of peer review can be very cruel when your fledgling efforts are summarily dismissed with comments that they 'add little to current knowledge', that your conclusions are 'not supported by the data presented', or worse still that the writing is 'confusing and verbose'.So how can the chances of this happening be minimised?Scientific writing is constrained within certain conventions.The report of any study should contain an Introduction (why what was done was done), a Methods section (what was done), a Results section (what was found), and a Discussion (what the results mean, what else has been published on the topic, and what's new).There should also be an abstract or summary at the beginning distilling the essence of the paper, and a list of references at the end together with any tables or figures.A full paper should normally be no more than 2000 words long, which is roughly 8-10 full pages of double spaced manuscript with wide margins.Abstracts should normally be no more than 250 words.Tables and figures should be kept to the minimum necessary to display results clearly, and should not repeat data described in the text.Exactly how manuscripts should be laid out for any particular journal (width of margins, style of citing references, layout of tables, preferred figure sizes, and the like) is described in each publications' 'instructions to authors'.These can be irritatingly variable, but thankfully many of the more respected journals (including this journal) now sub- scribe to a common set of requirements originally agreed by a group of medical editors in Vancouver in 1978.1But all this merely tells the aspirant author the basic rules of the game.It offers no help on how to play it well, and gives away no tricks of the trade.For that we need to go beyond Vancouver.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.