How to write and publish a scientific paper - Barbara Gastel, Robert A. Day 2022
The Imrad story
Historical perspectives
Some preliminaries
The early journals published papers that we call descriptive. Typically, a scientist would report, “First, I saw this, and then I saw that,” or “First, I did this, and then I did that.” Often the observations were in simple chronological order.
This descriptive style was appropriate for the kind of science then being reported. In fact, this straightforward style of reporting still is sometimes used in “letters” journals, case reports in medicine, geological surveys, and other publications.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, science was beginning to move fast and in increasingly sophisticated ways. Microbiology serves as an example. Especially through the work of Louis Pasteur, who confirmed the germ theory of disease and developed pure-culture methods of studying microorganisms, both science and the reporting of science made great advances.
At this time, methodology became all-important. To quiet his critics, many of whom were fanatic believers in the theory of spontaneous generation, Pasteur found it necessary to describe his experiments in exquisite detail. Because reasonably competent peers could reproduce Pasteur’s experiments, the principle of reproducibility of experiments became a fundamental tenet of the philosophy of science, and a separate methods section led the way toward the highly structured IMRAD format.
The work of Pasteur was followed, in the early 1900s, by the work of Paul Ehrlich and, in the 1930s, by the work of Gerhard Domagk (sulfa drugs). World War II prompted the development of penicillin (first described by Alexander Fleming in 1929). Streptomycin was reported in 1944, and soon after World War II, the mad but wonderful search for “miracle drugs” produced tetracyclines and dozens of other effective antibiotics.
As these advances were pouring out of medical research laboratories after World War II, it was logical that investment in research would greatly increase. In the United States, this positive inducement to support science was soon (in 1957) joined by a negative factor when the Soviets flew Sputnik around the Earth. In the following years, the U.S. government (and others) poured additional billions of dollars into scientific research.
Money produced science, and science produced papers. Mountains of them. The result was powerful pressure on the existing (and the many new) journals. Journal editors, in self-defense if for no other reason, began to demand that manuscripts be concisely written and well organized. Journal space became too precious to be wasted on verbosity or redundancy. The IMRAD format, which had been slowly progressing since the latter part of the nineteenth century, now came into almost universal use in research journals. Some editors espoused IMRAD because they became convinced that it was the simplest and most logical way to communicate research results. Other editors, perhaps not convinced by the simple logic of IMRAD, nonetheless hopped on the bandwagon because the rigidity of IMRAD did indeed save space (and expense) in the journals, and because IMRAD made life easier for editors and referees by indexing the major parts of a manuscript.
The logic of IMRAD can be defined in question form: What question (problem) was studied? The answer is the introduction. How was the problem studied? The answer is the methods. What were the findings? The answer is the results. What do these findings mean? The answer is the discussion.
It now seems clear that the simple logic of IMRAD does help the author organize and write the manuscript, and IMRAD provides an easy road map for editors, referees, and ultimately readers to follow in reading the paper.
Although the IMRAD format is widely used, it is not the only format for scientific papers. For example, in some journals, the methods section appears at the end of papers. In some journals, there is a combined results and discussion section. In some, a conclusions section appears at the end. In papers about research in which results of one experiment determine the approach taken in the next, methods sections and results sections can alternate. In some papers, especially in the social sciences, a long literature review section may appear near the beginning of the paper. Thus, although the IMRAD format is often the norm, other possibilities include IRDAM, IMRDRDRD, IMRADC, IMRMRMRD, ILMRAD, and more.
Later in this book, we discuss components of a scientific paper in the order in which they appear in the IMRAD format. However, most of our advice on each component is relevant regardless of the structure used by the journal to which you will submit your paper. Before writing your paper, of course, be sure to determine which structure is appropriate for the journal. To do so, read the journal’s instructions to authors and look at papers similar to yours that have appeared in the journal. These actions are parts of approaching a writing project—the subject of the next chapter.