A short comment on how to write research papers for STM journals

Dr Daping Zhang, the Executive Editor of Inorganic Chemistry Frontiers, kindly invited me to contribute a short comment on how to write a primary research article for publication in STM journals. There are, of course, many books and tips on this issue. As an author, reviewer and editor, as well as a non-native English speaker, I would like to share my experiences with you, and if my comment is of some help to you, it will be my pleasure.

I would like to start from the question of what are the prerequisites for writing a research paper (after you have done the research work). I could suggest two. The first one is to organize your data and results—the more organized, the better—in a logical sequence, for example, the order synthesis–structure–properties is a natural one in my research area. When doing so, figures and tables, even draft versions, could be prepared and used because they are the best vehicles with which to present your data, results, ideas and thinking. If you are a student, you are encouraged to discuss your data, results, thoughts, etc., with your supervisor, and he/she can help and guide you to shape all these. Then you can form an outline of your research work, in your mind, or on paper. It does not necessarily consist of well-written sentences. The initial outline could even be a collection of key words, as long as they are thoughtfully organized. An outline is the primary structure of your article, within which you can easily place the required elements and materials in a logical order and incorporate them the first time around.

The second one is to read and to study the literatures in your field. This is of course very important. From literature reading, you can learn the background, recent developments and key problems in your research field, shape your knowledge, know about the currently active spots, recognize the active and leading scientists and their research, evaluate the merits, novelty, scientific significance and impact of your own work, create your ideas, and find support for your own studies. You are able to gather knowledge of the style, layout and format of a research paper for individual journals, as well as to learn how to organize the data effectively and transfer them into nice, professional figures and tables. You can also learn the scope, focus and impact of the individual journals, and this will help you to choose the most suitable journal for your paper. Since there are many, even a huge number, of publications, even in a small research area, you might not be able, and it might not be necessary, to study each reference in detail. In most cases, a quick scan of the paper for its title, abstract, conclusion, figures and tables might be enough to grasp the essence. However, the ones closely relevant to your research work deserve deep study throughout. Reading the literatures should be a daily or weekly activity, and that outside of your field should also be visited if possible. There are also many other resources you can visit, such as databases, ISI, homepages of journals and authors, conferences, etc., from which you can learn more.

Now you can start. Generally, an original research paper is composed of several parts in the order: title, abstract, introduction, experimental section (this is for experimental research; for theoretical ones this might be details about the computation and methods used, etc.), results and discussion, conclusion, and reference list, though some journals might require placing the experimental section after the conclusion. However, if readers thought that the story described in the paper was prepared sequentially from title to conclusion, they might be disappointed to find out that the reality varies in many cases. To start writing from the title or introduction is usually not an efficient way to compose your paper, unless you really have everything very clearly in mind. The writing order we suggest is to start with the experimental section, then the results and discussion, the introduction and further refinement of the discussion, then the conclusion and abstract, and finally the title.

Beginning is always difficult , unless you start from the experimental section which is generally routine and thus could be reported with standard descriptions. When writing the experimental section you might recall what you did, observed and thought during your research, and in many cases this could provide useful information and merit further discussion in next part.

The results and discussion section is the most important one. In my case, if the data and results have been organized in figures and tables, I usually print them out instead of checking on the computer screen. Looking at these sheets, I will ask myself, what are these data telling me? What is the inherent relationship in or between the data? What is the new or scientific significance of my data/results compared to the previously published ones, and so on. I also write down the characteristic data and ideas on these sheets, even doing some simple calculations. Then it will not be difficult to further organize the data, create your results, and present them in a logical order or adapt them to the outline you have had, though the discussion might not be deep and fruitful. You may also need to modify or reorganize the figures and tables following the text flow. When finished, you not only have a draft of this part, but can also frame your results and have them, clear and detailed, in your mind.

Now we move to the introduction, together with the further refinement of the previous section. The introduction is simply to answer the question why this research should be performed (or more directly, why this work deserves publication). A good introduction should be pertinent to the research work, and avoid involving any irrelevant (even less-relevant) materials. It should provide a precise background, and answer questions: what is the challenge? How does it arise? What efforts have been made to solve this problem? Does this investigation make a new contribution? etc. In practice, an introduction should be like a funnel. It could start from a short paragraph or a few sentences describing the relevant research background in a somewhat general and wide sense, then concentrate on the much narrower area closely related to your research, and try to answer the above questions. It is clear that, if the authors have not framed their results and had them in mind, they might well move in the wrong direction in writing the introduction. When writing the introduction, you probably need to read the literatures again, and especially, to study in detail those papers most relevant to your own research. Reviewing the literatures is a chance for you to compare your own work with the reported investigations (and thus to evaluate the impact of your work), to find published materials to support your hypotheses, opinions and ideas, and more importantly, to solidify the contribution and significance of your own research. All these will naturally feed back to the refinement of the “results and discussion” section, and make this part, especially the discussion, more solid, deep and fruitful.

It should be easy now to compose the conclusion, abstract and title for your article. As I mentioned earlier in this comment, these three parts together with the figures/tables should convey the essence of the reported work to allow readers to understand the goals, experiments, achievements and challenges of your research without consulting the detailed discussion.

People sometimes confuse or do not care enough about the distinction between a conclusion and an abstract. The conclusion, as a part of the body text, should only summarize the main results of your work. Neither original goals nor any new results should be presented in this section. The conclusion might be quite detailed and include perspectives on the future development and potential challenge of this research.

An abstract, however, should provide an overview of your article, conveying as much information as possible. A good abstract is complete, succinct, objective and explicit, and should clearly state the aim and scope of the investigation, the method employed, the important results and main conclusion.

Finally, it is time to conceive a suitable title for the paper. Precision and conciseness are crucial to ensure that the title well characterizes the reported investigation within a limited length. It is key to make sure that every word in the title tells! An accurate and dynamic title can not only enable your paper to be found via search engines, but also attract attention from the target readers, making your paper stand out from a pile of similar works.

Now a draft of your paper is available, and basically it should be consistent as a whole, waiting for further revision. Before proceeding to the next step, share the draft with your co-authors, supervisors, or other colleagues for their suggestions and critical comments. Those different opinions will refresh your thinking and benefit the further revision.

Another thing I would recommend is to put the paper draft away for several days before making the main revisions. When you read it again, you will probably find errors, mistakes, redundancies, repeats, inconsistencies, unclear and convoluted sentences, confusing paragraphs, and so on. During revision, cut ruthlessly the redundancies, correct all the mistakes, clarify every confusion, incorporate the comments of your colleagues, and edit the paper carefully—even modifying and/or redrawing figures or reorganizing tables to make them clear, concise, easily understandable, balanced, professional, attractive, and even beautiful. In addition, it is not uncommon that new, important ideas or findings arise during revision. If so, incorporate them to make your paper better!

Now your manuscript is more or less ready for submission. You probably already have an idea of target journals for the publication of your work, based on your knowledge of the research area, the journal scope, the evaluation of the possible impact of your own work, and its content (general or specific, concise or complete, etc.). If you and your co-workers are all excited about the work, normally you may try to submit your paper to a high impact journal in your field. If your colleagues outside your research area are excited by your new discoveries too, a more comprehensive or interdisciplinary high impact journal may be a better place for your paper.

Before handing your manuscript over to an Editor, one step that should not be omitted is to read carefully the author instructions of the journal you would like to submit to, and amend the format of your manuscript, sometimes even part of its structure, according to those requirements. Some journals have very strict rules on this issue while others are more flexible. In either case, Editors will always appreciate manuscripts in the right style for their journal’s papers.

In the end of this comment, I would like to spare some space to talk about writing techniques. As English is the main language in STM publishing in the world today, I often encounter questions on English writing skills from my students and some non-native English speakers. In fact there are no tricks that can easily improve your English and make it beautiful and fluent as written by native speakers, except to keep reading and learning from well written English articles, and to practise as often as you can. More than wording a paper beautifully, the essence of scholarly writing is to present your new discoveries and evidence clearly and concisely. In this short comment I cannot go into details, such as how to write sentences briefly, clearly and directly, how to organize a clear and coherent paragraph, and so on. These can be found in many books or classes on writing. I just quote this: “Omit needless words! Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts!”.† These are the principles and rules we should follow in writing a paper, thinking of the just one-print-page Nature paper of Watson and Crick that revealed the structure of DNA.‡

Finally, please devote time, energy and concentration to writing, do not do it casually.

I would like to thank my colleague, Prof. Zhe-Ming Wang for helpful discussions and contributions.

Footnotes

† William Strunk, Jr. The Elements of Style, 1918, ch. 2.

‡ J. D. Watson and F. H. C. Crick, Nature, 1953, 171, 737.

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