Scientific Writing

1. Scientific Writing
RCS-001 Research Methodology
Dr. Anita Goel
Associate Professor (Computer Science)
Dyal Singh College, University of Delhi
goel.anita@gmail.com
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2. Writing and Publishing a Scientific Paper
1. Understanding Academia
• Why Publish?
• Know your community
• How Journals work
• Presentation of Scientific Journals
• Ethical Guidelines
2. Before Writing –
Delimit Paper
• Know your paper
• Literature review
• The Gap
• Research Design
3. Writing the Paper
• Purpose of writing
• Structure of paper
• Preliminary advice
4. After Writing -
Checklist
• Content mistakes
• Formatting mistakes
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3. Writing and Publishing a Scientific Paper
1. Understanding Academia
• Why Publish?
• Know your community
• How Journals work
• Presentation of Scientific Journals
• Ethical Guidelines
2. Before Writing –
Delimit Paper
• Know your paper
• Literature review
• The Gap
• Research Design
3. Writing the Paper
• Purpose of writing
• Structure of paper
• Preliminary advice
4. After Writing -
Checklist
• Content mistakes
• Formatting mistakes
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4. Why Publish?
• Research is to find something new. How will you know that?
• When you publish, other researchers can look at what you did in your lab
• When you do research you see what others have done from their publications
• Get credit for your work
• Conveying important new information.
• Advance Scientific age - Share your results. Results in lab, no progress.
• Feel stronger about your work - Criticism from reviewers who are experts
• Get familiar with other academics working on your topic
• Like currency - Evaluated to number of publication, and kind of journals.
• Contributes to determining salary, academic position, grant application6/28/2017 Scientific Writing 4

5. Know your community
• Make precise research
• Basic/applied; theoretical/experimental approach; qualitative/quantitative method.
• Discover researchers working in your topic.
• Search, Classify, Read papers into groups - essential papers and related papers.
• Position your research under the scientific context.
• Identify academic conferences and journals important for your research
• Identify influential researchers
• Make recent 10 year bibliography
• Build academic network - Meet authors in conference , Visit research center & labs
Continuous and iterative process. No one standard way. Learn as you go.
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6. How Journals work?
• Peer review system - aims at securing quality of articles
• Anonymity
• Double blinded
• Acceptance ratio
• 5% to 70% of old submitted papers
• Time Scale - several months to years
• Researchers use preprint server to register their paper to allow for immediate
sharing of results. Common in Astronomy and high energy Physics
• Content accuracy
• Inaccurate knowledge harms credibility of society to the scientific community
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7. Presentation of Scientific Journals
• Important - Through paper submission your work can get published.
• Process
• Editor-in-chief (desk reject) or send for review to editor (corrections).
• Chosen editor asks peers to blind review the paper.
• When submitting paper to journal, Look for
• Editorial board, its composition, their research, areas of expertise
• Articles most referenced. Include references to commonly cited articles
• Tailor your article for a journal, hence one editor - minimize desk reject risk
• Key communication with editors – Abstract and Cover letter
• Cover letter – Focus of research, motivation, why journal is match for publication
• Abstract - sum up your research, first thing people read in article
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8. Ethical Guidelines
• You keep basic intellectual property, but give away copyright to editor
• What you write is owned by firm behind journal
• You cannot copy-paste text/image of another person/ journal
• Publishing (No legal right) is different from patent
• Every author should be put in the author names of the paper
• Misconducting
• Fake/altered data
• Submitting to different journals in the same time; equivalent findings in two
separate papers or journals, even if they use different languages.
• Plagiarism check, Citation is important
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9. Writing and Publishing a Scientific Paper
1. Understanding Academia
• Why Publish?
• Know your community
• How Journals work
• Presentation of Scientific Journals
• Ethical Guidelines
2. Before Writing –
Delimit Paper
• Know your paper
• Literature review
• The Gap
• Research Design
3. Writing the Paper
• Purpose of writing
• Structure of paper
• Preliminary advice
4. After Writing -
Checklist
• Content mistakes
• Formatting mistakes
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10. Know your paper
• Contribution of the paper
• Experiment you did
• Results you obtained
• Significance of the result you obtained
• The context in which the result has to be understood
• Position your paper so that researchers specialized in the
theme will accept it.
• Build your literature review, core elements in an academic paper.
• What kind of paper do you want to write
• Theoretical, empirical, methodological
• Design of the paper will be different
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11. Literature Review
• Learn what has already been done in your field
• Analogy by Isaac Newton. If I ascend further, it is by standing on the
shoulders of giants.
• We see further than the giants, and then increase the men of knowledge.
• Literature review - specify why and how your work is original
• Originality may be-
• New empirical work
• Interpreting known ideas in a new way
• Giving new data to old problems
• Translating results from one technique or context to another
• Reading trans-disciplinary research
• Producing original sentences
• Finding a new field of research
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12. The Gap
• Identify gap after literature review
• Present your gap
• Explain your objectives - how you want to fill this gap.
• Present your research question
• Don't hide it behind complex sentence or in middle of big paragraph.
• It should be the one sentence tracking out your paper.
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13. Research Design
• Research question – Main thread. Justifies the research process.
• Prepare skeleton of your paper
• Coherent Design
• Each part is coherent with one another
• All are coherent with the research question
• Ask questions
• Is problem coherent with literature strand?
• Is methodology compatible with problem?
• Do I bring answers only to research question?
• Do I enrich comprehension of literature with discussion of results?
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14. Writing and Publishing a Scientific Paper
1. Understanding Academia
• Why Publish?
• Know your community
• How Journals work
• Presentation of Scientific Journals
• Ethical Guidelines
2. Before Writing –
Delimit Paper
• Know your paper
• Literature review
• The Gap
• Research Design
3. Writing the Paper
• Purpose of writing
• Structure of paper
• Preliminary advice
4. After Writing -
Checklist
• Content mistakes
• Formatting mistakes
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15. Purpose of Technical Writing
• Inform
• About the data
• Persuade
• Discuss the data
• Do both in an efficient manner
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16. Types of Published Literature
• Books – novels - classic and new
• Aim is to keep audience engrossed, If it is mystery, specific details are hidden
till end, audience kept confused till end
• Newspapers –day to day, key details presented, conciseness
• Magazines – extended form of newspaper article, written in context
• Books, Magazines, Newspapers
• Do not follow a formal review process. Editor may get them reviewed
• Journal article
• Different style of writing
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17. Why is technical writing difficult?
• Not aware of what is required in technical writing paper
• Unconsciously we pick habits like book, articles, newspaper
• High expectation of first draft – we have finished work, why are we re-
writing, supervisor not happy. Students do not appreciate what is
being corrected in the paper
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18. Beginning of the Document
• Title
• Area of Research – What is New?
• Abstract
• Give away all important results of your work
• It is for those who have not seen your work before. So be careful with the
terms
• Introduction
• What is your work
• Why is it important – compare with other work
• What is required to understand your work
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19. Middle of the Document
• Presents greatest detail of the work
• Experimental Details
• Results
• Result is a factual statement of data
• There is no judgement
• Nobody can argue about the result
• Discussion
• Understand implication of the result
• Analyse the result
• It is an opinion
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20. End of Document
• Conclusion
• It is similar to abstract about what are your results
• You can assume that the reader has read your work
• It is similar to abstract but can have technical jargon
• You can also give future perspective
• References
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21. Abstract
• Shortened version of the paper
• Should contain all information necessary for the reader to
determine:
• (1) what is the objective;
• (2) how the study was done;
• (3) what results were obtained; and
• (4) significance of the results.
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22. Introduction
•Why is this study of scientific interest
•What is your objective?
•Discuss previously published studies, to help explain
why your study is needed
•Your specific contribution
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23. How to Cite Sources in Introduction Section
• Articles by one or two authors - cite using their last names.
• For more than two authors - the last name of 1st author followed by
abbreviation et al.
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24. Results
• Presents the results but do not interpret their meaning.
• Summarize the data with text, tables and/or figures..
• Number tables and figures separately beginning with 1.
• Refer in the text to each figure or table in your paper.
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25. Discussion
• Explain the results. Why they differ from what other works
• Interpret results
• Relate to objectives of the paper.
• Conclude based on your data
• Suggest future directions
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Nowadays there is one section of “Results and Discussion”

26. Citation
• All papers must be cited
• For papers published in journals you must provide the date, title,
journal name, volume number, and page numbers.
• For books you need the publication date, title, publisher, and place of
publication.
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27. What effects efficiency of the document?
• Language
• In novels etc. there is less emphasis on writing simple straight things
• In technical paper keep it simple and straight
• Do not write long sentences (when you reach the end of sentence you
should not have forgotten the end of sentence
• Using phrases like it is obvious – improper way of conveying
How to Write a Scientific PaperCraft of Scientific Writing Michael
AlleyScientific Writing.pdf
• Illustration
• Select judiciously to convey the idea – chart, graph, figure, table etc.
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28. Writing and Publishing a Scientific Paper
1. Understanding Academia
• Why Publish?
• Know your community
• How Journals work
• Presentation of Scientific Journals
• Ethical Guidelines
2. Before Writing –
Delimit Paper
• Know your paper
• Literature review
• The Gap
• Research Design
3. Writing the Paper
• Purpose of writing
• Structure of paper
• Preliminary advice
4. After Writing -
Checklist
• Content mistakes
• Formatting mistakes
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29. Content mistakes
• Does the problematic remain the same throughout the paper?
• Is the title of the paper coherent?
• Are the keywords adequate?
• Is content coherent with aim and scope of the journal
• Is the so what of article clear? Is the reasoning understandable? Do
we need more data/calculations to say that? Is everything coherent?
• The writing is going to be evaluated by your peers.
• It is very important to get them interested, but how can you actually
do that?
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30. Formatting mistakes
• Improper language, spelling mistakes, typos all these are a no go.
• No long sentence. Write in an active voice and not a passive one.
• No complicated words. Be simple and straight to the point.
• Its hard to correct your own paper. So try and find proofreading buddies.
• Some common format oversights - pagination; improper bibliographical
styles; quoting styles. For that, download a template and comply to it.
• Adequate organization of the paper.
• Clear titles of sections, of figures and tables, of the paper itself.
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31. Sources
• “Introduction to Research”, Technical Writing, NPTEL, Prof.
Prathap Haridoss, IIT Madras. Link
http://nptel.ac.in/courses/121106007/20
• “How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper” 4 week course in
Coursera. Link https://www.coursera.org/learn/how-to-write-
a-scientific-paper/home/info
• The Craft of Scientific Writing – By Michael Alley, Springer
1996, ISBN 0387-94766-3
• How to Write a Scientific PaperCraft of Scientific Writing Michael
AlleyScientific Writing.pdf
• Writing good scientific papers, MPIP, Mainz, 04/2016
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32. Some other sources
• http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/
• https://elc.polyu.edu.hk/cill/eap/
• https://bid4papers.com/blog/spelling-grammar-punctuation-
mistakes/
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