{"id":700,"date":"2018-08-17T08:30:00","date_gmt":"2018-08-17T12:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/?p=700"},"modified":"2018-08-16T10:39:37","modified_gmt":"2018-08-16T14:39:37","slug":"a-few-thoughts-on-how-to-structure-a-scientific-paper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/blog\/2018\/08\/17\/a-few-thoughts-on-how-to-structure-a-scientific-paper\/","title":{"rendered":"A few thoughts on how to structure a scientific paper"},"content":{"rendered":"

I mentioned last week<\/a> that I\u2019m reading Williams & Bizup, Style: The Basics of Style and Grace<\/em>. Yesterday I came across this very succinct advice for the early stages of writing a paper and thinking about how to structure it.<\/p>\n

When you plan a paper, look for a question that is small enough to answer but is also connected to a question large enough for you and your readers<\/em> to care about.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you\u2019re a scientist and writing a paper,1<\/a><\/sup> you already have the data and most or all of the statistical analyses done. So the \u201clook for a question\u201d part has to happen twice in writing a scientific paper.2<\/a><\/sup> You need to \u201clook for a question that is small enough to answer but is also connected to a question large enough for you and your readers<\/em> to care about\u201d before you begin collecting data. Then you need to collect data that will answer that question.<\/p>\n

Science being what it is,3<\/a><\/sup> after you\u2019ve collected the data you\u2019ll find that there are data you couldn\u2019t collect that you wanted to collect4<\/a><\/sup> and there are data you collected that you didn\u2019t anticipate collecting. In writing the paper you now have to look at the data you have in hand, identify a question that the data in hand can answer that is connected to a larger, interesting question, and (this is the hard part) write the paper using only<\/strong><\/em> the data that answer that larger, interesting question. If you\u2019re like me, you5<\/a><\/sup> will have collected other data that don\u2019t fit in this<\/strong><\/em> paper. That doesn\u2019t mean they\u2019re useless, and it doesn\u2019t mean you should discard them. It merely means that they\u2019re not useful for this<\/strong><\/em> paper. With any luck you\u2019ll find that they are useful for another paper that you\u2019ll write in the future.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Or at least if you\u2019re a scientist like me and writing a paper. ↩<\/a><\/li>\n
  2. Or at least it has to happen twice if you\u2019re me. ↩<\/a><\/li>\n
  3. Or at least science being what it is in the way that I do it. ↩<\/a><\/li>\n
  4. Especially if your research involves work in the field. ↩<\/a><\/li>\n
  5. In the interest of full disclosure, I have to point out that I almost never collect data myself. It\u2019s my students and collaborators who collect the data. Even when I\u2019m in the field, I mostly hold the field notebook and write down the measurements someone else is making. I rarely make the measurements myself. The closest I usually come to collecting data myself is collecting samples from which someone else derives data. ↩<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I mentioned last week that I\u2019m reading Williams & Bizup, Style: The Basics of Style and Grace. Yesterday I came across this very succinct advice for the early stages of… Read more ><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=700"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":702,"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700\/revisions\/702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}