Writing a paper for publication helps in improving your scientific knowledge, which adds advancement to your career and your institution. Writing paper for publication requires complete dedication towards planning and process of writing. To complete your work in an easier way, start with the methods section first, move on to the results section next, then here come the challenging section that is discussion part. By analysing the value of an article, the level in which it comes under the article will be found.
Reasons for Writing
You can write a publication paper for any reason. It can be to disseminate and advance your knowledge for betterment in your career or for the advancement for your institution.
- Advancing Knowledge
Your research work will not be considered as a research work unless you publish it in any of the refereed journal. If you have a research which you think is worthy then, publish it in any peer-reviewed journal that could reach a large audience. If you want to publish your paper then your idea should be an original research (new), have novel result (case report), new interpretation or insight from old literature (review article).
- Advancing your Institution
If the paper published by you is in high quality, then your institution will get more benefit out of it such as prestige and funding. Based on the quantity and quality of results published from your institution, your institution can get supports like funding and other supports which are provided by government, private and corporate sources. Students who are planning for clinical training will be more attracted towards the institution which more publishes their research and clinical achievements.
- Advancing Yourself
- Getting promotion
- Profile enhancement
- The ability of your research will be increased
- You can get world-wide recognition
What to Write
You can write a scientific paper in different ways. It can be a report from any clinical trial, or report of a case, research paper of a laboratory or review article, or a report of guidelines such as a new biochemical or surgical technique. Try to explain about all the abbreviations used in starting itself; avoid jargon, slang, clichés and colloquialism.
How to Start
Make a decision on the journal in which you are going to publish your journal after completion of the writing work. This is important because the guidelines for writing paper can vary from one journal to the other. Details such as length of manuscript, text formatting, charge per page, payment for colour photographs and the amount of information in methods section, may vary. You can get details about it usually in instruction section for author, which will be printed on journals or from journal website.
The Anatomy of a Manuscript
For writing scientific papers, the sections other than reviews, hypothesis papers and case reports, uses same format which are title, introduction, discussion, abstract, methods, references and results. For start writing, begin with a title that may be temporary which will help you with your project in going forward.
- Methods Section
Start writing your paper from this section. Split into subheadings about the usage of different materials such as animal or human subjects, statistics and techniques. When you are using animal or human subjects in your research work then mention about them in your paper along with the details of number of used subjects, groups created for subject, inclusion and exclusion criteria and also obligatory requirement with statement that should indicate about the permission given by appropriate committee of ethics regarding your study. While discussing about the statistics, readers and reviewers should get a clear description about the statistical methods you used for designing and result analysis purpose in your manuscript, for validating it. Before start collecting the required information a statistical design for your study is must, it helps you in several ways. While discussing about the techniques used, present it in a detailed manner so that others can repeat the method, or provide with a reference from which they can know about the complete description of methods and don’t write about the modifications you made in those techniques.
- Results Section
Don’t mention about any background information in this section, instead be particular about only the data. You can add background details either in introduction or in discussion section. Make use of the rough figures and results you made, as guide. The result you write should all details regarding the mean values with an addition of spread to index.
Example: “The standard error of the mean (SEM) or standard deviation (SD), together with indications of statistical significance”.
- Discussion Section
When you reach this stage, you will be completely familiar with the topic, recent researches related to it and also with evaluation of result. It is the difficult part of your paper writing.
- Introduction:
The introductory part should hold details of the importance of topic, reference result and key concepts of the topic. To support your argument in paper you have to write about the hypothesis, specific question that need to be tested or concerns about your opposing point of view from the literature. Also discuss about the method or technique you chose to address the problem.
- References:
Authors of article prepare their reference list according to them. Make sure you have prepared an accurate reference list. A reference list can have 40 citations if it is a laboratory or clinical papers, and the review papers can have about hundreds. Make sure to read the guidelines for Authors because most of the publications contain restrictions for some words due to constrain in space. You can make use of any software references such as Endnote which helps you in formatting changes, since each publication have different format for reference from one another. You could download reference from PubMed or Medline to reduce the transcribing mistakes, based on the new program of reference management.
- Abstract:
Firstly, know about the publication standards because basically the abstract prepared by publishers restrict within 250 words. Include details regarding key concepts like background information, methods, introduction, conclusion and result. You can either write a single paragraph of abstract or divide it into sections like introduction, discussion, methods and results. The abstract must also cite the publications of others.
- Title:
You should come up with a catchy title which attracts the reader’s attention and defines your topic. Readability is the thing you should keep in mind to select a topic. You title can be question, can be a small statement regarding primary findings to make it more effective. The impact for the title can be considered important in some publication that are non-specialist and well known among users of library such as, “British Medical Journal, New England Journal of Medicine, and Lancet”.
How to Finish
You have to present about the findings of your research at a conference which may be a national meeting or international meeting. You can find more problems regarding your research which needs to be addressed by presenting your work to critical audience, experts or journal referees. It also helps you get avoided to rejection and help you reduce the amount of revision you should do before submission.
Finish your writing with
- Your final draft
- Finding the targeted market place
- Article which have been rejected.
