Formatting an Academic Article

 

What you’ve done is thorough. All of your laboratory data is well organized, and you’ve made a thorough list of all of the necessary sources. To get your scientific, technical, or medical work published in a renowned publication, you’ve probably authored a first draft of it. However, how can you style your work to ensure that all of the information is accurate? Read on if you’re a researcher or a co-author who wants to get your work published in a scientific journal.

 

When writing your first draft of a paper, it’s important to keep in mind that you’ll need to adjust your research to fit the requirements of the journal in question, which will provide specific author guidelines for formatting the paper (such as the author guidelines provided by Elsevier, PLOS ONE, and mBio). In this post, we’ll go over some of the formatting guidelines that are common to all scientific writing, so that you can make sure your work is formatted correctly (IMRaD), learn about the specific requirements of each part, and locate resources for standard vocabulary and measurement units.

 

Overview of the Modeling Environment

 

IMRaD is for introduction, methodology, results, and discussion, which are the four essential components of a scientific publication. A suggested length for each section is provided in the table below.

 

Here are the primary sections you may need to include in your paper’s structure.

 

The Front Page of the Book

 

The title of the study, the authors’ names, institutional affiliations, and contact information must all appear on the document’s first page. There must be a reference to the corresponding author (i.e., the one who will communicate with the reviewers) and their full contact information (e.g., an email address and a phone number) must be included. As an illustration, consider the following:

 

Abstract

 

You must state your subject (i.e., what you did) and summarize the most important findings and conclusions from your work in this executive summary.

 

The following are some helpful formatting tips:

 

Abstracts should not contain citations (the reader might not be able to access your reference list).

An acronym or abbreviation may be unfamiliar to the reader of your abstract. Instead, use the entire terms.

 

Keywords

 

Include a list of important terms below the abstract to assist other researchers in finding your work. There is no space between “keywords” and the colon that follows:

 

Format of a document, writing in the scientific style

 

The following are some helpful formatting tips:

 

Each term should be capitalized or not, depending on whether “Keywords” should be emphasized.

Make sure punctuation is correct (e.g., commas versus semicolons, the use of the period at the end).

A taxonomy of keywords is provided by some periodicals (e.g., IEEE). This helps you categorize your research.

 

Introduction

 

As the reader’s first impression of your paper, this should be clear and simple. Utilize in-text citations to provide valuable background information about your subject matter. Describe how your research contributes to the body of knowledge in the field and how it fills in any research gaps. Outline the limitations of your study and the specific problem you’re attempting to solve. At the end of this section, you can insert a research question, hypothesis, or objective.

 

The following are some helpful formatting tips:

 

Sort your data in a broad-to-narrow fashion (general to particular). Don’t begin too broadly, however; make the facts you provide useful.

When writing this part, use in-text references to place your study within the context of previous studies.

 

Methods

 

Research methodology is explained in this section of your work. In order to ensure that your findings can be replicated by other researchers, you should explain your research methods in a logical sequence. In general, stick to the tried-and-true techniques you employed, but be sure to go into greater depth when describing any of your own invention.

 

The following are some helpful formatting tips:

 

Include the manufacturer’s name and location in parentheses when describing the instruments you used in your investigation.

Maintain a consistent presentation of information (e.g., quantity, temperature, stirring speed, refrigeration period).

 

Results

 

To wrap things up, you need to tell us what you learned from your investigation. Outline the key findings of your investigation in this section. If you’re using tables and numbers, you don’t need to add too many specifics. Be consistent and use the fewest words possible to describe your statistics in this part.

 

The following are some helpful formatting tips:

 

If you’re working with an abundance of information, consider adding appendices or supplemental documents.

To help the reader keep track of what they’re reading, use headings (but check whether your style guide allows you to use them).

 

Discussion

 

Your findings are presented to the reader in this section, where you explain your findings in light of past research and the literature as a whole. Include a discussion of the research’s advantages and disadvantages, as well as the ramifications of your results. You need to answer the hypothesis and/or research question that you posed in the introduction.

 

The following are some helpful formatting tips:

 

To back up your arguments, use in-text citations.

Make sure to avoid reiterating material from the results or introduction unless it is vital to illustrate the research’s overall significance.

 

Conclusion

 

In some cases, this part is included in the final paragraph of the article. Give an explanation of your research’s relevance to the subject of study in which you major, as well as suggestions for further study.

 

The following are some helpful formatting tips:

 

Keep this paragraph to a minimum.

 

Acknowledgments

 

Include a brief acknowledgement of the funding source (such as a fellowship or grant) and any contributors to the book in your conclusion (e.g., technical advisors or editors).

 

The following are some helpful formatting tips:

 

Use Elsevier’s Funder Registry to see if your journal utilizes a standard identifier for funding agencies.

 

Disclosing Potential or Actual Conflicts of Interest or Origin

 

The originality of your study and the absence of conflicts of interest may be required by some journals (i.e., ulterior motives or ways in which you could benefit from the publication of your research). The length of this section should be no more than a few words.

References

 

List the citation information for every source you’ve used here, such as the author(s), publication date(s), title(s), and location(s) of the journal(s) or book(s). For example, you may want to list your references by alphabetical order (author–date style of citation) or by how they appear in your essay (numbered citations). If you don’t have access to a style guide, adopt a citation format and stick to it.

 

The following are some helpful formatting tips:

 

Before submitting, double-check that all of your references and in-text citations are in agreement (i.e., no missing or conflicting information).

It is common in some styles of citation to utilize a dangling indent and alphabetize the sources in order. Citation formatting can be made easier with the use of Microsoft Word’s styles.

It is important to keep track of bibliographic information using a reference system such as EndNote, Zotero or RefWorks.

 

Appendices/Additional Materials

 

If you have additional information that doesn’t need to be in the main body of the document, you can provide it in this optional part. It’s important to remove anything that isn’t necessary from this section in order to fit it into a relatively short research report.

 

The following are some helpful formatting tips:

 

This part is not commonly found in peer-reviewed studies. Before submitting, make sure the publication accepts supplemental data and don’t include anything that isn’t absolutely necessary here.

 

How to Format the Details

 

In addition to the main structure of your work, there are additional considerations to keep in mind. In the next sections, you’ll learn how to use scientific writing norms to express your vocabulary, equations, tables and figures, measurements, and statistics.

Terminology

 

Keep your terminology constant. In most cases, short forms can be used once the full term has been presented;

 

alphabetic names against alpha-nucleotides (e.g., DNA versus deoxyribonucleic acid) and species names versus short forms (e.g., Staphylococcus aureus versus S. aureus).

 

The adoption of standard scientific vocabulary is a good technique to assure uniformity. If you’re unsure about which guidelines to follow, you can consult the following resources.

 

Correct use of italics must be adhered to in scientific writing. As a starting point, here are some guidelines:

 

The italicization of species names, which are often written in Greek or Latin, is standard practice (e.g., Staphylococcus aureus).

Proteins, however, are not italicized, unlike genes.

 

Equations

 

In mathematical, scientific, and technical articles, equations are structured in a consistent way, regardless of their subject matter. Calculations should be formatted according to these guidelines:

 

Insert the number in parenthesis after each equation you provide in the text.

 

In this case, adding X and Y equals 1. (1)

 

Find out if your target journal requires the word “Equation” to be capitalized or to use parenthesis when referring to equations in your article.

 

In the first equation, X stands for.

 

OR

 

In the first equation, X stands for…

 

(Variables should be written in italics.)

 

Instead of using standard English characters to type single variables or mathematical operators (such as or x), utilize Unicode characters in running text while working with MathType or Equation Editor in Microsoft Word. Editing your text and formatting your equations before publishing is much simpler as a result.

As previously mentioned, if you need to make modifications to your math equations before publishing, save them as editable text rather than graphics.

 

Figures and Tables

 

The data you’ve gathered so far hasn’t been presented in any visual form. When writing a scientific article, you should familiarize yourself with the standards for referring to tables and figures. Here are a few real-world examples to get you started.

 

The International System of Units (ISO) is widely accepted as the best standard for measurement, despite the fact that each journal has slightly different formatting requirements (SI). The SI should be used whenever possible. Units of measurement can be formatted in a variety of ways:

 

Units of measurement should be separated by a comma. 2.5 mL, not 2.5mL, is an example of this.

Consistency is key when it comes to measuring things (especially date and time). 3 h. or 3 h., for example

Statistics

 

It is critical that you appropriately characterize the relationships between your data when you present statistical information. Incomplete sentences about the significance of some variable irritate reviewers more than unclear statements to this effect. Statistical tests should include the name of each test, its n value, a description of why the test was chosen, and the particular alpha levels and P values for each test, according to the Nature journal’s author requirements.

 

For Elsevier articles, we explained the statistical formatting standards as follows:

All relevant parameters should be included in the list of statistical tests.

For data with a regularly distributed distribution, use the mean and standard deviation.

When presenting skewed data, use the median and interpercentile range.

If accuracy is required, use two significant digits for numbers.

For extremely small samples, never use percentages.

In order to support your findings and conclusions, you must be able to demonstrate that your findings and conclusions are based on the most accurate facts and that you acknowledge and respect the views of those who disagree with your findings and conclusions.

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