The secret Secret oRecipe for a Quality Scientific Paper: Fulfill Readers' and Reviewers' Expectations.
Yaoqi Zhou
Indiana University School of
Informatics, Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis
Center for Computational Biology and
Bioinformatics, Indiana University School of Medicine
Dedication
50th birthday of the University of
Science and Technology of China
My first experience with scientific writing in English was the
translation of my Chinese B.S. thesis. By the time I graduated with a PhD from
State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1990, I had more than 20
publications. However, my understanding of how to write high-quality scientific
papers remained at an elementary level and was limited to minimization of
grammatical errors. This happened because most of time I simply accepted the
changes made to my manuscript by my PhD. advisors, Dr. George Stell and Dr.
Harold L. Friedman, without knowing or asking why. During my postdoctoral study
at North Carolina State University, my mentor, Dr. Carol Hall, encouraged me to
attend a two-day writing workshop at the neighboring Duke University. The
workshop taught by Professor Gopen truly opened my eyes. For the first time, I
learned that readers have expectations when they read, and the most effective
way to write is to fulfill their expectations. This workshop helped me write my
first research proposal, and I was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship to work
with Dr. Martin Karplus at Harvard University. During the five years at
Harvard, Professor Karplus made me realize that a good paper requires an
in-depth, tough, and thorough self-review. Now, I am a professor myself with my
own research group. I constantly feel the need to teach my students and
postdocs to write better. I do not consider myself an expert in scientific
writing, but I do think that sharing my understanding and writing experience
might help others to avoid the long journey that I took to sharpen my writing
skills. If you have any comments and suggestions, please feel free to email me
(yqzhou@iupui.edu). You are also welcome
to visit my webpage: http://sparks.informatics.iupui.edu.
Table
of Contents
Preface
Introduction
What readers want
Readers' expectations
Readers' expectations of a sentence
Readers' expectations of a paragraph
Readers' expectations of a table/figure
What reviewers want
How to meet the demands of potential reviewers
Structure of a paper
Methods/experimental procedures
Results section
Title
Introduction section
Discussion section
Abstract section
Summary
Epilogues
Acknowledgement
References