Scientific writing 3.0: A reader and writer's guide - Jean-Luc Lebrun, Justin Lebrun 2021

The introduction starts fast and finishes strong
Introduction: the hands of your paper
Paper structure and purpose

Extended hands welcome and invite to enter. They guide someone unfamiliar with a new place. The introduction of a paper plays a similar role. It greets, provides guidance, and introduces a topic not familiar to the reader. Hands point to something worthy of attention, and invite the eyes to follow. The introduction also points to the related works of other scientists and to your contribution.

For many, the introduction is a necessary evil, something more difficult to write than the methodology or results section. Therefore, to ease the burden, the scientist usually keeps it brief. Alas, brevity is only appreciated by the few experts in the field already familiar with the introduction material. The many readers (a reasonable 40%) with a significant knowledge gap will not be satisfied. Reviewers could even be among them. Ask a reviewer how many papers he or she accepts to review without full expertise in the matter being reviewed, and be ready to be surprised! Therefore, write an introduction that bridges their knowledge gap, otherwise they may not be able to evaluate your paper correctly. Remember that they have veto power over the selection of your paper for publication.

Writing Against All Odds

Vladimir, rejected paper in hand, was reading the online comments from the three people who had reviewed his paper. From the remarks, Vladimir could tell that two of them were knowledgeable in his field. It was the remarks of the third reviewer that bothered him. Clearly, that was not someone from his field. He had presumed all of them would be experts.

Popov, his supervisor, was passing by. Vladimir called him.

“Hey, boss, aren’t you supposed to be an expert in the field before you are invited to review papers?”

“Often the case. May be 80% of the time.”

“You mean you have reviewed papers that are outside of your direct field of expertise?”

“Sorry, Vlad, no time to chat, have to run off to a meeting.”

Left alone, Vladimir did a quick mental calculation. Let’s see. If I have three reviewers, what is the probability that I get at least one reviewer who is not an expert if each reviewer’s probability to be an expert is 80%... Hum, that would be… point eight times point eight, that’s point sixty-four times point eight again, and that’s…sixty times eight, four hundred and eighty, plus four times eight, thirty-two, that makes …51.2% chances that all reviewers are experts. So I have one chance in two that at least one of my three reviewers is not an expert!

On his way back shortly after, Popov stopped in front of Vladimir’s cubicle. “Meeting cancelled,” he said. What is it you wanted to know?”

“Are you sure about your 80%?” asked Vladimir.

“80% what?” His boss had already forgotten.

“80% chance to be a direct expert in the topic of the paper you are asked to review.”

“That sounds about right. It depends on the journal of course. For large journals, the percentage may be even lower.”

“And out of three reviewers, how many have to recommend your paper for it to have a chance to be published?”

“Again, that will depend on the journal, but for prestigious journals, I’d say, all three.”

“Great! Vladimir mumbled. That means that I have to write my paper to be understood by amateurs!”

“Are you calling me an amateur, Vladimir, … because in front of you stands the amateur who has reviewed many papers where he did not consider himself to be an expert in everything that was written.”

“Oh, no, Boss… You’re a pro, right John?”

From across the cubicle partition, John’s voice shouted:

“A real pro, Boss!”

The introduction starts fast and finishes strong

The introduction engages. Do not keep the reader’s brain idling for too long. Your reader is eager to go places. How do you know for sure? Well, the impatient reader having gone past two filters, the title (coarse grain) and the abstract (fine grain), decided to click on the download button. Interest must be high! Do not bore or delay the reader. Do not disappoint with a false start that slows the pace of your introduction.

The vacuous false start

In the age of genomes, large-scale data are produced by numerous scientific groups all over the world.

Significant progress in the chemical sciences in general, and crystallography in particular, is often highly dependent on extracting meaningful knowledge from a considerable amount of experimental data. Such experimental measurements are made on a wide range of instruments.

Because of the long-term trend towards smaller and smaller consumer goods, the need for the manufacture of micro components is growing.

Was there anything in these examples you did not already know? Catch and ruthlessly exterminate these cold starts, these hollow statements where the writer warms up with a few brain push-ups before getting down to the matter at hand. By the way, if you are such a writer, do not feel bad. Many of us are. It takes a little while for our brain to output coherent and interesting words when we face a blank page or a blank screen! Since we have a propensity to do brain push-ups at such times, let’s make sure to remove the sentences they produce.

Here is another type of false start. At first glance, there seems to be nothing wrong. After all, the writer tries to conjure up excitement by showing how massively important the current problem is.

The considerable false start

There has been a surge, in recent times, towards the increasing use of …

There has been considerable interest in recent years in this technology, and, as trends indicate, it is expected to show continuing growth over the next decade …

In this type of false start, the author sees the heat of a research field as being sufficient to warm the reader to his contribution. The words used to raise the temperature are ’exponential,’ ’considerable,’ ’surge,’ ’growing,’ ’increasing,’ and other ballooning words. They lead an important class of readers, the reviewers, to suspect a “me-too” paper. There may have been a recent surge but the writer is obviously running behind the pack of researchers who created the surge. People who are pioneering research make the future, they don’t catch up with the past!

Reviewers may also suspect that the writer is attempting to influence their judgment by equating importance of problem to significance of solution. If many people consider the problem important, does that make the contribution an important one? There is no necessary cause and effect relationship here. If I shake hands with a nobel prize winner, does that make me a great scientist? If my neighbor has been arrested for robbery, does that make me a felon?

The right start

It is best to start with what readers expect: they want more details. Your title is sketchy. It draws the silhouette of a face. Your abstract puts a bright but narrow frontal spotlight on the face, giving it a flat, even look and making everything else recede into the shadows. The introduction is the soft filling light. It adds dimension, softens the shadows, and reveals the background. To use a metaphor familiar to photographers, the abstract privileges speed of capture whereas the introduction emphasizes depth of field.

At the start of the introduction, since the face is still in full sight of a reader, it is best to remain close to the title and frame it in context. The context, be it historical, geographical, and even lexical (definitions), should not lose its relationship with the face. Returning to the photo metaphor, the reader should constantly see the face in the viewfinder even when the perspective widens. Too many papers paint a landscape so vast in the introduction that the reader is unable to place the title in it.

Here is a fast and focused start combining definition and historical perspective.

Name Entity Recognition (NER), an information extraction task, automatically identifies named entities and classifies them into predefined classes. NER has been applied to Newswires successfully [references]. Today, researchers are adapting NER systems to extract biomedical named entities — protein, gene or virus — [more references] for applications such as automatic build of biomedical databases. Despite early promising results, NER’s ability to apply to such entities has fallen short of people’s expectations.

After reading this paragraph, the reader expects the writer to explain why success is limited, and to bring an answer to the main question: what adaptations to the original NER would enable biomedical named entities to be extracted more successfully.

The dead end

At the Doorstep — Rejected!

Steve Wilkinson is an insurance agent for a large insurance company. He is also Vladimir’s neighbor. For weeks, he has been chatting across the fence with Vladimir’s wife, Ruslana (about insurance of course), while she prunes her rose bushes in the garden. She finally tells Vladimir who, being quite good at maths and curious to find out about the benefits of insuring his family, decides to accept his neighbor’s invitation to hear about his company’s insurance products. A date is fixed: next Thursday after work.

Thursday evening. Vladimir shows up at Mr. Wilkinson’s front door and rings the bell. Steve goes to open the door, and immediately enters into a monologue at the doorstep before letting Vladimir in.

“Recently, an increasing number of people buy insurance because of global warming. Global warming may lead to life and property threatening weather. AIE, and PRUDENTA offer insurance schemes in this domain. A different scheme is examined today. After four years of insurance premiums, the GLObal WARming BLanket Insurance Scheme, GLOWARBLIS, provides a 5.6% yearly interest on the insurance premiums, assuming the global warming index remains stable four years in a row. A 1-point fluctuation in the global warming index during this period will decrease the yearly interest rate by a corresponding amount. After entering this house, go through the corridor leading to the living room where the prospectus will be examined. Following this, proceed to the office to discuss the signing of the contract. After signature, return to this door to leave with a package presenting other insurance schemes from the company.”

Table-of-content type endings have no place in an introduction where readers can just flip a few pages and discover the whole structure by rapidly scanning the headings and subheadings. Therefore, don’t end your introduction as seen below.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses related work. Section 3 presents the technology and shows how our approach is conducted using our scheme. Section 4 presents the results of our experiments and shows how the efficiency and accuracy of our approach compare with others. Finally, we offer our conclusions and discuss limitations.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes some related works, in particular similar work that has been done. Following that, the proposed approaches are discussed in section 3, with the implementation details being discussed in section 4. Section 5 evaluates the performance and compares the proposed approaches to a baseline model. Finally, we draw conclusions and outline future work in section 6.

When a place is small and more or less standard — for example the house of the insurance agent in the Vladimir story — there is no need to describe the various rooms and tasks that lay ahead. But when the place is large and not standard (the White House in Washington, the Imperial Palace in Beijing, or the Versailles Castle in France), it is wise for the guide to give a brief overview of the visit (schedule, route followed…) before entering. A Ph.D thesis, or a book, is large enough to deserve an introduction that helps the reader anticipate what are the main parts and what they accomplish.

The strong finish

At the Doorstep

Steve Wilkinson is an insurance agent for a large insurance company. He is also Vladimir’s neighbor. For weeks, he has been chatting across the fence with Vladimir’s wife, Ruslana (about insurance of course), while she prunes her rose bushes in the garden. She finally tells Vladimir who, being quite good at maths, and curious to find out about the benefits of insuring his family, decides to accept his neighbor’s invitation to hear about his company’s insurance products. A date is fixed: next Thursday after work.

Thursday evening. Steve sees Vladimir approaching his house. He goes to open the door even before Vladimir has a chance to ring the doorbell, and warmly greets his neighbor.

“Vladimir, I’m so glad you could come. Today is a day you will remember as the day you found peace by sheltering your family from the financial worries that global warming brings with its devastating tornadoes and countless other financial calamities. Come in, come in.”

The best ending to an introduction is in this second Hollywoodapproved scenario: Vladimir is told about the outcome of signing the insurance contract, and then moves right in. End your introduction with the expected post-contribution outcome of your research to keep reader motivation high.