Writing is intrinsically a creative and structured process, which is when written in a technical form and designed to convey the scientific information to the research community is considered as scientific writing. For scientific researchers, writing is an apposite skill that they should possess and incorporate with critical thinking in order to achieve success.
Writing for peer-reviewed publication is an integral part of the researcher’s career and something this important needs to be commenced well. However, many scientists and researchers do not consider themselves as good writers, therefore how can an average scientist write a well-structured and error-free scientific paper?
As we all know, writing a paper and getting it published in a peer-reviewed and high impact factor journal is hard work, even after the hard work that led to the publishable results. Hence, to solve such issues, we provide the researchers with a quality enhancement service to structure their articles with zero error policies.
However, from the researcher’s end, there are seven standard steps which can be considered for writing a quality research report in order to achieve research funding, publication in a renowned journal, to obtain university credit and various other professional goals.
- Seeking and following the instructions and author guidelines.
- Recognizing your target audience.
- Planning and drafting the outline of the report.
- Designing and preparing tables, figures, and other supplementary materials.
- Structuring your report in the most productive order.
- Organizing and citing the appropriate references for the report.
- Revising your outline draft and final checking of the content, language, and possible errors.
1. Seeking and following the instructions and author guidelines.
One must consider the best way to structure the article before he/she begins writing and knowing what and how to write is important for preparing a successful scientific report. However, failing to consult a publisher’s guidelines can cause rejection of the submitted scientific report, even though the research findings and content of the report is potentially excellent. Hence, knowing the requirements and expectations of the target journal is crucial. Moreover, if the researcher has not yet decided the target journal, then a standard journal should be approached for author guidelines.
2. Recognizing your target audience.
About the audience, one must need to answer a question at the start. Who are you writing for? The researcher must consider the audience in the most specific way by anticipating what they want to hear and what is the most engaging topic right now? Defining who your real audience is will help you in focusing not only on developing a great report but also on developing the right scientific report. Also, as we know the researchers and the medical practitioners are the ones who are going to use your report, but the funding and approval committees are just there to check the outcomes and other criteria which are not directly linked to the quality of the report. Hence, it is advisable to prepare your report for the broader audience as the online publication extends the scientific report to a wide and unpredictable audience.
3. Planning and drafting the outline of the report.
After the selection of the target audience, the data needs to be organized and structured. The research findings or the results are the main principal outcome of the research and hence, presenting it in an appropriate manner is essential. The guidelines and instructions for authors plays a major role in the drafting and structuring of the report. For a standard journal, the Introduction part should be concise and describe the nature of the problem under investigation and its background. The Methods section should consist of enough details about the procedure, statistical test or analysis which have been carried out to generate the results. The Results section should represent the main findings and outcomes of the study. Here, the data needs to be represented by using tables and figures. The Discussion part should discuss the significance of the results and must compare them with previous work using appropriate and most specific references. The conclusion section should highlight the novelty and significance of the work and must provide future advice and scope.
4. Designing and preparing tables, figures, and other supplementary materials.
The Result section is generally the most crucial part of a scientific report and hence, use of tabulated data and illustrated figures are a wonderful way to present the data. Tables should be comprehensible, and a reader should be able to express an opinion about the results just at looking at the tables without reading the main text. Most of the readers primarily prefer to look at figures, and graphs rather than reading lots of pages. Moreover, the appendices and other supplementary materials for a scientific report can be similarly prepared in advance and refined as the report is drafted.
5. Structuring your report in the most productive order.
Now, based on the outline of the draft and the collection of data, the report needs to be structured. As you have already prepared the outline of the scientific report, now you need to do is structure the data accordingly. The writing should start from Methods section followed by Results, Discussion and Conclusion sections. The Introduction section doesn’t require much effort and hence can be written at the end. The writing should be in simple language with appropriate choice of words that are easily understandable. The content should be grammatically sound and free from any possible errors including spelling and punctuation.
6. Organizing and citing the appropriate references for the report.
Referencing is a way to give credit to the writers of the articles that you have accessed or used while developing your scientific report. By citing the work of a particular scholar you acknowledge and respect the intellectual property rights of that researcher. It is advisable to make a record of all the references while reading the different available research reports related to your work. It is the best way to make sure you have cited all the appropriate references accurately. Once the report has been structured, the next step is to cite all the references at the appropriate location on the report. And after that, arrange all the reference in a numerical list and place them at the bottom of the report.
7. Revising your outline draft and final checking of the content, language, and possible errors.
Revising is not only about checking the spelling or grammatical errors, it is a crucial step to assess the flow of content and language from sentence to sentence throughout the report. Identify where a sentence needs to be restructured and check the logical flow of the ideas. And finally, review your introduction and conclusion and make sure the information presented here works with ideas in the body of the paper. The report should be well structured and all the tables, figures and references should be cited or placed in the appropriate location of the text.
Writing a scientific report involves expertise which a researcher might not possess. Manuscriptedit.com specializes in providing services in scientific writing and structuring of the report. The expert advisors also enhance the quality of the report by checking the errors in grammar, mechanics, punctuation, usage, spelling, citations, and formatting.