The Ultimate Guide to Scientific Papers, Part 1:

How to Write a Scientific Paper

Before You Begin

Guides for how to write a scientific paper usually put the abstract first because that is where it will appear in the final paper. Unfortunately, for the confused and overwhelmed student, the abstract should be completed last, and it can be a bit frustrating for a beginner to follow a guide that isn’t chronological. For that reason, we’ve put the detailed description of the abstract in a separate post.

First, your school, department, or professor, will likely provide important information in your syllabus or the assignment itself about how to write a scientific research paper. Relax and follow it! Just go step by step, and don’t let the fact that scientific research paper format is a little different from other research papers get to you. Whether you have done something dozens of times or never before, you still do that thing one step at a time.

The Introduction

An introduction to a scientific paper is only slightly different from a regular introduction. It provides a brief map of the paper to come, but it does so with both specificity and brevity. For humanities and social science papers, students are often exhorted to use the introduction to get their audience excited; in a scientific paper, your introduction should persuade other scientists to continue reading by describing the basics of the study’s nature and approach.

The research question. Instead of a thesis sentence, it will state the question that was tested in the experiment (e.g. “This research tests the percentage of people who like vanilla ice cream).) It should also state, briefly, how this was tested. This would include the type of sampling (e.g. “We used a randomized sample of 1,859 adult men and women”) and the means of analysis (e.g. “Data was analyzed using STATA,”) and the specific test used (e.g. “Because variables were categorical, a Chi-squared and Fisher’s exact test were used.”)

This is usually the student’s next wave of panic. They got over ignoring the abstract for now, but now the intimidating language has begun. Do not let is worry you. Nearly everyone in your class will be struggling. Write up a draft of your intro and then send it to your grader. She would much rather correct you now than fail you later. Many students don’t want to ask because they are embarrassed that they will be wrong, but being wrong on your final is worse than making a mistake on a draft.

Materials and Methods

Being succinct (aka, to the point or brief) is a major key to scientific papers. However, you are not cutting it short in order to hide things or leave things out. Think of it like a recipe, there is the part where the recipes list the ingredients in the order they are used, and the part where they describe each step. A good way to outline your materials and methods section is to list the material and steps like the ingredient list in a recipe. For example:

1. Vanilla ice cream
2. 23 women and 23 men
3. Three Sunday afternoons
4. At Venice Beach
5. Purposive sample
6. Cross sectional study
7. Three questions on a Likert scale

And so on.

• Once your outline (ingredient list) is complete, you can add more information about the brand or brands of ice cream, the importance of using mode when analyzing ordinal data and the rest. You may want to keep it in outline form until the very end. This will make it is easy to go back and add details as you progress through the study and then the write up.
• The materials and methods section or sections of the scientific paper are often the longest and the driest section. For people unfamiliar with this type of writing, it is often the hardest part because it is so different from what is commonly understood to be good writing.

Think again of the recipe analogy or a sports playbook. No one cares how you feel or what the sunlight looked like, here is where you make sure that any baker or player could successfully learn to complete the same task in your absence.

This is also why maintaining the outline format is helpful. If you are new to scientific writing, you will remember new information as you write. A numbered outline will help you see where the new information should go.

Results

The biggest difficulty for students in this section is not including any of their analysis. Continuing with the recipe and playbook analogies, you do not want to say that the result was a delicious cake or a championship ring. You want to say whether the texture was tender, dry, wet, etc., not whether it was good or bad. Here you describe what happened, including not so great things. If the cake collapsed, say so; if the play is best attempted only on a first or second down early in the game, include that information.

If something is obviously wrong with your data or study, say so. That is both good science and a good scientific paper. You don’t say that a play will work on any down or no matter how many yards your offense needs. Your study did not find that “Everyone love vanilla ice cream!” or that “X cures Y!”, instead you found that vanilla ice cream is preferred by a specific percentage, or that a particular brand is preferred. You may also find that your questions revealed no preference.

Discussion

Finally, you get to editorialize and include some of your thoughts and opinions! If you compared three kinds of vanilla ice cream and there was no favorite, it could be that there is no difference between the ice creams or that you didn’t ask the right questions. Seeing, understanding, and describing your mistakes are the foundations of good science. You can talk about how a future study might avoid the mistakes you made. You can also talk about how your study helps the field. For example, if there was a strong preference for one ice cream, you can talk about how ice cream providers would do well to develop recipes like that ice cream.