Organization of a scientific paper - What is a scientific paper? - Some preliminaries

How to write and publish a scientific paper - Barbara Gastel, Robert A. Day 2022

Organization of a scientific paper
What is a scientific paper?
Some preliminaries

A scientific paper is organized to meet the needs of valid publication. It is, or should be, highly stylized, with distinctive and clearly evident component parts. The most common labeling of the component parts, in the basic sciences, is introduction, methods, results, and discussion (hence the acronym IMRAD). Actually, the heading “Materials and Methods” may be more common than the simpler “Methods,” but the latter form was used in the acronym.

Some of us have taught and recommended the IMRAD approach for many years. The tendency toward uniformity has increased since the IMRAD system was prescribed as a standard by the American National Standards Institute, first in 1972 and again in 1979 (American National Standards Institute 1979a). Some journals use a variation of IMRAD in which the methods section appears last rather than second. Perhaps we should call this IRDAM. In some journals, details regarding methods commonly appear in figure captions.

The basic IMRAD order is so eminently logical that, increasingly, it is used for many other types of expository writing. Whether one is writing an article about chemistry, archaeology, economics, or crime in the streets, the IMRAD format is often the best choice.

This point is generally true for papers reporting laboratory studies and other experiments. There are, of course, exceptions. As examples, reports of field studies in the earth sciences and many clinical case reports in the medical sciences do not readily lend themselves to this kind of organization. However, even in these descriptive papers, the same logical progression from problem to solution is often appropriate.

Occasionally, the organization of laboratory papers must differ. If a number of methods were used to achieve directly related results, it might be desirable to combine the materials and methods and the results into an integrated experimental section. In some fields and for some types of results, a combined results and discussion section is usual or desirable. In addition, many primary journals publish notes or short communications in which the IMRAD organization is modified.

Various types of organization are used in descriptive areas of science. To determine how to organize such papers and which general headings to use, refer to the instructions to authors of your target journal and look at analogous papers that the journal has published. Also, you can obtain general information from appropriate source books. For example, types of medical papers are described by Huth (1999), Peat and others (2002), Taylor (2018), and contributors to a multiauthor guide (Hall 2013); types of engineering papers and reports are outlined by Michaelson (1990) and by Beer and McMurrey (2019). Indeed, even if a paper will appear in the IMRAD format, books on writing in one’s own discipline can be worth consulting. Examples of such books include those in biomedical science by Zeiger (2000); the health sciences by Lang (2010); chemistry by Ebel, Bliefert, and Russey (2004); and psychology by Sternberg and Sternberg (2016).

In short, the preparation of a scientific paper has less to do with literary skill than with organization. A scientific paper is not literature. The preparer of a scientific paper is not an author in the literary sense. As an international colleague noted, this fact can comfort those writing scientific papers in other than their native language.

Some old-fashioned colleagues think that scientific papers should be literature, the style and flair of an author should be clearly evident, and variations in style encourage the interest of the reader. Scientists should indeed be interested in reading literature, and perhaps even in writing literature, but the communication of research results is a more prosaic procedure. As Booth (1981) put it, “Grandiloquence has no place in scientific writing.”

Today, the average scientist, to keep up with a field, must examine the data reported in very many papers. Also, English, the international language of science, is a second language for many scientists. Therefore, scientists (and, of course, editors) must demand a system of reporting data that is uniform, concise, and readily understandable.