Writing a Paper

The Structure of a Scientific Paper (Parts of this document are adapted from "The Do's and Don'ts of Writing a Laboratory Report for BIO310" by Dave Nycamp and Nikki Sarkar). The scientific paper is the primary means by which scientists communicate their findings. Scientists get their ideas by reading the primary literature and proposing new hypotheses based on the results of other studies. By their nature, scientific papers are technical and information-dense; thus they must adhere to a very rigid structure to help make them clear and unambiguous. Scientific papers go through a rigorous peer-review and editorial process before they are published. Nevertheless, some papers are lousy - badly written, boring, or of questionable scientific value (bad study design, inappropriate statistical methods applied, or just don't contribute much to our understanding of the phenomenon under investigation). As you progress through your training as scientists, you need to develop the ability to read papers critically. Graduate students spend a lot of time in "journal clubs" discussing and critically evaluating papers (this is actually more fun than it sounds!). 1. Title: The title should be specific and informative - this is the first thing that pops up in a library search. "Facultative manipulation of offspring sex ratio of Peromyscus leucopus in response to environmental cues" is better than "Offspring sex ratio of Peromyscus". 2. Abstracts: Abstracts are short summaries of papers that allow readers to quickly scan the scientific literature when researching a topic. An abstract should contain (1) the purpose of the study, (2) the major results of the study, and (3) the main conclusions drawn from the data. Abstracts do not contain references (citations), refer to figures or tables, or describe materials and methods. Abbreviations in the abstract must be spelled out (e.g., "temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD)"). 3. Introduction: An introduction lets the reader know what was investigated and why. It provides a review of the literature - what is known about the subject area - and describes how the study contributes to what is known. A well-written introduction moves from the general to the specific, drawing the reader's attention to the purpose of the study, and usually concludes with a specific statement of the hypothesis. The introduction