Promoting your work to the materials community: editor top tips for writing an effective research paper

Abstract

Authors and editors alike want publications in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A to be visible to the community and to have strong impact in their respective fields and beyond. To help authors craft manuscripts that will be exciting, impactful and meaningful, and to withstand the test of time, the editors of J. Mater. Chem. A provide their tips and recommendations on structuring your paper to emphasise the new insights, rigour, and significance of your work.

Cover letters

This is your elevator-pitch moment. To convince the editor that the readership of the journal will be interested in your findings, the cover letter is your opportunity to promote your work and articulate clearly how this is an excellent fit to the journal.

The editor has access to the abstract of your manuscript too, and so, the cover letter should not be paraphrasing the abstract, but instead should complement the abstract by highlighting the key aspects of novelty, insight, and potential advances for the community. Remember that J. Mater. Chem. A is a broad-scope journal, and editors are unlikely to be specialised in your specific field of study, so make sure you include contextual information to highlight the importance of your manuscript. Describe the challenges your work is tackling and suggest the impact your work will have on the community given your new insights and findings. Furthermore, discuss future directions of study and how your work contributes to advancing the field overall.

Keep it short and snappy, and easy to understand for non-specialists – imagine you are explaining to a final year undergraduate student the key message of your work and what makes it exciting.

And remember – once published, readers won't have access to your cover letter. Be sure that all your hard work explaining the significance of your study is reflected throughout the paper itself too!

Titles

Imagine you are a reader working in your field of study – what search terms would you employ to find relevant research? What might catch your eye when scrolling through pages of results?

The title of your manuscript should draw readers in and tell them upfront why they should read your paper, while being general enough to appear in search results. It should be as succinct as possible, but as long as necessary to help readers working in the field find your paper and identify the topic of your study.

Titles can:

• State the main conclusion of your study.

• Mention the system or material you report.

• Comment on a long-standing question in the field.

However, titles should not:

• Contain acronyms unknown to the general readership.

• Use subjective descriptors like “interesting”, “highly efficient”, “facile”, or “novel”.

• Contain complex formulae that require special text fonts or formatting.

To illustrate the impact of an effective title, consider the three examples below, all describing the same study.

(1) Novel superamphiphobic coatings.

(2) Fabrication of superamphiphobic coatings under PAL, 1H,1H,2H,2H-perfluorodecyltriethoxysilane and tetraethoxysilane.

(3) Durable and self-healing superamphiphobic coatings repellent even to hot liquids.

The first example is too broad and doesn't illustrate what this particular paper is about. The second is too specific with chemical names included and your key audience may not be directed to it via typical search engines. The final example illustrates the key finding of the work and the specific advantages of this coating, rather than subjective terms like “novel”, and is likely to appear in general search results for “superamphiphobic coatings”.

Abstracts

The abstract provides a summary of the motivation of your study and an open question to be answered, the principal findings and how they advance the specific function or understanding of the system and contribute to the broader field. It allows readers to grasp the central points of the paper without reading the entire text.

The abstract should:

• State the scientific problem to be addressed.

• Introduce the approach and methodology you have taken to tackle this scientific problem.

• Present selected numeric data that support your insights and findings.

• Summarize the main conclusions, stating why the findings are important scientifically and how they advance the broader field of study.

The abstract should not (only) be an introduction to your paper, and it should not (only) be a conclusion.

Introduction

The introduction places the study in the context of the broader scientific findings within the field. It provides enough information so that readers outside the specific topic area can understand the motivation of the work and introduces the work of others on this topic using literature references. Remember that J. Mater. Chem. A covers many different topic areas within materials chemistry, so a reader may not be well versed in the most recent developments or challenges of a specific subfield. Your introduction should state important problems in the field and describe how your study tries to overcome them. To articulate this clearly, it may be useful to discuss the original fundamental literature and the most recent impactful papers in the field. All of this helps in contextualising the relevance and impact of your current work to the research community.

The introduction should:

• Define a context for the research undertaken.

• Explain the methodology or approach you have taken that provides new insight to this research area.

• Describe previous work by others to contextualise your findings.

• Describe the state-of-the-art in the field.

• Explain known problems and challenges.

• State the central hypothesis of your study and how your methodology or approach examines it.

An introduction should not only reference the author's own work – make sure you are transparent about other similar studies and how your work contributes to the field overall, for example in terms of our fundamental understanding of this field or in the demonstration of a clear advancement in performance or knowledge.

Experimental

The experimental section is a central part of a scientific manuscript. It provides the detailed research methodology so that readers can understand the materials and the measurements and reproduce these. For papers on materials synthesis including the experimental setup that was used. This allows others to reproduce the work and to build on it.

Remember to also make use of the Supporting Information to ensure that the ‘story’ of your research flows, while still including enough information for others to validate, reproduce and build on the study.

The experimental section should:

• Provide the sources and purities of all reagents used.

• State masses, moles and volumes for all reagents and solvents.

• Explain how reagent solutions were prepared.

• Provide information on how the product was purified.

• For papers on materials synthesis, state the product yields.

• State the density and concentration information of commercial materials.

• Tell readers what instruments, methods, and samples were used for measurements, including, where necessary, the timings and repetitions of steps.

• Provide references to procedures copied or adapted from previous works.

Results and discussion

As the title says, this section should show the data, describe it, compare it to the literature, and draw conclusions. Importantly, the discussion should have a logical flow that allows readers to understand the system and its properties and functions. The results and discussion section may contain:

• An explanation of the new insights gleaned from this work.

• Comparison with the previous reports with respect to most important parameters.

• Discussion of the fundamental concepts.

• Discussion of measurement errors and their sources. For example, if we consider water electrolysis, you may wish to discuss iR compensation, Tafel plot comparisons, product analysis, or faradaic efficiency.

• Figures and tables.

Figures and tables

Figures are an important component of a scientific publication as they convey the measured data and concepts for their interpretation. For many editors and reviewers, the figures are the first aspect of the paper that is considered and evaluated, so it is important that they are of high quality and clearly illustrate the data. Ensure you include error bars and an error analysis.

Be careful with complex graphics with lots of information and panels that may distract from the data or make it difficult to view.¹ There is no limit on the total number and size of figures in a manuscript in J. Mater. Chem. A, but authors should try to avoid figures that are redundant or have little unique information content. Carefully consider the point you are making with each figure or table – what does it add to the overall ‘story’ of your manuscript? Figures and tables of mainly technical information can be moved to the Supporting Information.

In terms of figure captions, brief experimental detail should be highlighted in the caption itself so that readers can quickly understand the context of the figure without scanning the text. To aid reviewers, figures should be placed directly in the text where discussed, rather than at the end of the manuscript.

Conclusion

The conclusion is the place to summarize the major findings of your study and to describe their expected impact on the field. This can be done by restating the methodology employed and some of the main properties. New insights of the work should be highlighted and the main scientific conclusions should be summarized. Unresolved issues can be stated together with plans for future studies. Importantly, no new data should be introduced in the conclusion section. Additional literature references or figures should also be avoided, if possible.

References

References establish the connection between your study and the previous scientific literature. They provide the background of your work and identify the earlier contributions made by others on the general topic of your study. Who first prepared the material and how? Who first determined its structure and measured its significant properties or discovered its function? Who further optimized the material? Who are the other main players working in the field? Importantly, references should be balanced and not just cite one group of researchers or one short period of time. Self-citations should be kept to a minimum. Building a good list of references takes many hours of literature research. Identifying the key references in a particular area of study is what turns authors into experts.

Final remarks

Scientists are driven by curiosity about the world and by their desire to solve important problems for the benefit of society. Scientists are expected to provide objective views. Therefore, personal bias and exaggerative (hyperbolic) language should be avoided in reporting results. Words like ‘highly’, ‘superb’, ‘extreme’, ‘unique’ and ‘interesting’ are subjective and do not convey real, quantifiable information. As others have pointed out before, labels like ‘efficient’ are only meaningful when defined numerically.²

We look forward to hearing about the real advances in your work and working with you as editors to bring your exciting research findings to the materials chemistry community. In addition to other resources,³ we hope our editor top tips help you highlight the importance of your study and improve the impact of your paper.

References

1. V. K. Prashant, ACS Energy Lett., 2022, 7(7), 2407–2409,  DOI:10.1021/acsenergylett.2c01441.
2. S. L. Scott and C. W. Jones, Superlative Scientific Writing, ACS Catal., 2017, 7(3), 2218–2219,  DOI:10.1021/acscatal.7b00566.
3. S. M. Richardson, F. Bella, V. Mougel and J. Milic, Scientific writing and publishing for early-career researchers from the perspective of young chemists, J. Mater. Chem. A, 2021, 9, 18674–18680.

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