如何写出优秀的科技论文
1. Key points:
(1) writing should start early in the research project;
(2) research and writing are carried out simultaneously;
Writing process: an iterative process.
After a research idea has been developed, you should start writing the paper (Gray, 2005).
(3) best tools for writing should beused.
2. General guidelines
(1) To inform not to impress;
(2) Aim for clarity and readability and reproducibility;
(3) Contributions must be clearly stated;
The main contributions of your paper must be clearly stated after a brief review of the literature: in which way your work differs from the existing literature. Be precise, as this is where the reviewers will try to find problems with your work. Their goal is to identify whether your work is novel or not. If it is not immediately clear from the Abstract and Introduction you risk being unconvincing.
(4) Every unit of discourse (a sentence, a section, an article etc.), no matter the size conveys only a single idea or message
Each paragraph conveys only a single idea or message. Do not be afraid of writing short paragraphs, even twosentence
ones. Use simple sentences that are linked together so that your writing is coherent
(5) Avoid jargon;
Avoid jargon which are the specialized vocabulary of any profession, trade, science. Writing a paper is not a race
for complexity. You should make it as simple as possible for a neophyte reader to understand
(6) Minimize chances for reviewers to raise issues
(7) Some common mistakes
3. Structure your paper
(1) write a global paragraph (or mini-introduction) between the heading of a section and the heading of its first subsection; See example as following.
PS 对这点，个人持保留态度。为完整表述作者意思，故在此列出！
(2) The introductory section of a paper should contain the following items:
- What the problem that the paper is solving;
- Demonstration the importance of that problem;
- What are the current approaches to solving this problem and what is wrong about them;
- What are the contributions of the paper;
- Planning the readers for reading the subsequent sections.
What we commonly see is introductory sections of about 2 to 3 pages, full of just plain text with lots of jargons. There are two problems with this type of writing. First, only the authors and a dozens of experts can understand what is going on. Second, the paper loses many readers. We have realized that using some formula, figures, tables in the introduction section significantly improves the readability
(3) Conclusion Section should include the following items:
- One or two sentences summarizing what the paper has been about;
- Summarizing the key findings of the paper;
- What could be improved.
If the reader has to read your Conclusion to know what your paper is all about, then your Abstract and Introduction were not well written.
(4) Referenes
- Cite originals not derivatives;
- Avoid citing a list of two many papers e.g. ‘See [1-20] for some relevant work’. This helps neither the readers to find anything, nor the authors of [1-20] to get credit;
- If a author-year reference format is used e.g.’Walker (1996) studied ...’, all references in a single citation should be ordered in chronological order. For instance, ‘To help ease the writing process, books and articles giving advice on how to write scientific papers have been written (Day, 1998; Ashby, 2000; Plaxco, 2010).’
4. Some tips
(1) It is also useful to ask peers to read over your work. Before giving your first draft to your supervisor(s), have it proof-read by a peer (i.e., if you are a PhD student, ask another PhD student for their opinion).
(2) Do not submit until you are really happy with the work, as it usually does not save time to submit a piece of work which we know ourselves could be improved: the reviewers will think likewise, or be even more critical than we are ourselves of our work.
(3) If you feel stuck at writing any parts of the paper, feel free to do something else because keeping focusing on the writing does not always help. Most often, ideas come when you are in a diuse mode, a concept proposed in Oakley et al. (2018).