Scientific Writing: Easy when you know how Jennifer Peat BMJ Books docx

[...]... publishing your work Box 1.1 Reasons to publish your research results It is unethical to conduct a study and not report the findings You have some results that are worth reporting You want to progress scientific thought or improve health outcomes You want to give credibility to your research team You want your work to reach a broad audience Your track record will improve You will add credibility to your... questions that you will answer in your paper In an ideal world, you would also have decided to which journal you are going to submit your work and you will have obtained their “Instructions to authors” Then you can begin First, you will need to start the document by inserting the headings and subheadings that you will be using By forming a framework into which to assemble your aims, your methods, your findings,... planning stages of a paper If you prefer this, then document planning is especially important for you 13 Scientific Writing If you are using a computer to write your paper, then it is important that you use all of the software facilities that you have at your disposal Headers and footers can be used to label your paper, number the pages and date the draft on which you are working Your software can also be... paper is easy if you begin with a plan in mind By using a template to put your paper together and by assembling your thoughts in a logical order, the task becomes much less daunting than you might imagine You also need to follow some simple rules when planning and writing your paragraphs and then your sentences It is important that papers are not allowed to meander and grow in an unplanned way If you were... party, you would work to a plan, so why not do this with something that is as fundamental to your research career as a scientific publication? This chapter will explain how writing using a logical framework helps you to structure your paper correctly, which then helps to prevent your readers and reviewers from getting lost Once your paper has a logical structure, Chapters 8–11 will help you to improve your... with scientific papers As you write you may think new – and sometimes exciting – thoughts Certainly you will be forced to clarify your thoughts If you can’t write it clearly then you probably haven’t thought it clearly As you wrestle with the words new insights should occur What you didn’t understand you will have to understand I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I never quite know what I think until... organise yourself accordingly Whatever your creativity pattern, it is important to visit your writing as often as possible, every day if you can Writing new text may take a significant amount of work but reading and reviewing written text to polish it up can often fit into short time blocks and can be done anywhere When you have spare moments to edit your writing, you need to inspect your sentences and your... the other hand, if you don’t have an important question, good data with which to answer it, and a clear message for your audience, you should think twice about starting to write the paper You should try to reach a consensus with your coauthors about preferred journals when you are first ready to start writing your paper This will help you to decide on the style and the format in which you will write and,... writing process, you must focus on the potential audience for whom you are writing your paper The editor and external peer reviewers of a journal are the only people whom you have to impress in order to get your work into print, so write explicitly for them Odds on, if these people think that your work is worth publishing, then the scientific audience that you hope to reach will think so too If you are writing... case you might revise your paper accordingly It’s really the same technique that you should apply when stopped by the police The result may well be acceptance Charged with the knowledge of your importance, I urge you to write It can be a pleasure Novelists describe how their characters take on lives of their own, beginning to amaze and fascinate their creators Something similar can happen with scientific .