Motivational Book for Students

Writing Scientific Papers
Copyright 2008. All rights reserved by Dr. Nophea Sasaki

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There is a method and pattern to writing scientific papers that can be learned. Being able to write them, as well as getting them published in some of the most prestigious journal or publication becomes important in forging your future in an educational environment.

I remember I tried to write an English paper once in early 1998 but it was so bad that anyone could hardly understand it. This was while I was working on learning English and trying to complete my Master’s Degree. One scientist from the United Kingdom helped editing my paper; I was surprised that most of my words and sentences were replaced. My second paper in English was checked by a Canadian. It was then published in a scientific proceeding of an international conference. But, in addition to writing I also had difficulty with presenting the paper in English. I had to work hard to overcome this and eventually have been able to write and present better.

Scientific papers or peer-reviewed journal papers are sometimes lengthy. They are intended and written to present a problem, offer some critical insight and hypothetical solutions to it. Also included are the means by which you achieved different solutions, methods used to achieve them and analysis of that information written persuasively as to which method works better and why. It is an official document that will be widely distributed and published, if done correctly, and its outcome can be used for future similar conditions or situations in the real world – so you must be accurate in also acknowledging and citing sources used. To be accepted, your paper must address something that has not been addressed before.

Although scientists use different methods or approaches for writing their scientific papers, the method could be generalized as follows:

1. Come up with a short, descriptive title.

2. Write an Abstract describing major methods, research materials, results, conclusion, and recommendations, if any. The length of the Abstract is around 300 to 500 words. The Abstract should be accompanied by up to five keywords.

3. Include the background or introduction describing the on-going problems that you will address. Usually, you discuss the differences between your previous works and those of other scientists’ works, which include but are not limited to methodologies, research data or materials and the results. Then you propose a new idea or hypothesis for solving the differences. Here, you also include your research objective and how the paper is structured.

4. After proposing the problem comprehensively and defining your research objective, you propose new or innovative methodology (ies), explaining how you collected the data and how the data is analyzed using the method you just proposed.

5. Offer results: in this section you should be able to write the results. If necessary, you should present your major findings in tables or graphs.

6. Discussions (some people want to include this in the result section, that’s OK too): Here you discuss your results and methodologies and compare them with previous studies.

Most important, you must be able to explain how your methodologies are innovative or new or simple, what makes them stand out from previous works. And, therefore, your study should be better than the previous one.

7. Uncertainties (optional): depending on your studies, you should discuss the sources of uncertainties of your studies such as due to parameterization problems, data collection problems, or assumptions etc. This opens up a new way for further investigation to the problems. Remember that scientific findings are not always perfect, especially in forestry or global warming. If all scientific findings were perfect many scientists would have been awarded Nobel Prizes. Or, scientific research would end because every finding would be perfect.

8. Framework for implementation (optional): you may want to discuss how you turned your findings into a practical solution or how the public or policy makers could use your findings.

9. Conclusion: this is simple, but important. Simply summarize your findings along with recommendations for future works.

10. Acknowledgement (optional): if your research is funded by a grant, etc., you may want to acknowledge that grant here. It could open up the way for future grants.

11. Literature cited: cite all the references you have quoted for your study.

Note: This article was taken from Nophea Sasaki’s book “Walking Away from the Killing Fields - How a Hopeless Boy Became a University Professor in Japan” available at http://www.nophea.net

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