Welcome everybody, welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to our webinar presentation today. You're all extremely welcome to this webinar. It's a joint presentation

brought to you today by Bentham Science Publishers and Research Square Company. My name is Gareth Dyke. I'm the content director at Research Square Company. We're just going to wait for a few moments to allow other people the opportunity to join us in the Zoom room. But in the meantime, why not write a little message in the chat box?

Let us know where you're from. Let us know some of the issues that you are perhaps facing with academic writing and publishing. And we will do our best, of course, always to help you. Our presentation today will be about the structure of an academic paper.

As I mentioned a moment ago, we'll get started in just a moment. But do let me know where you're from. Do type a message into the chat box. Do say hello. Do say good morning, good afternoon, good evening, welcome to our webinar.

Today it's so good to see so many people joining us in the session today. My name's Gareth. We will be talking about the structure of an academic paper. I hope that you can see the screen. I hope that you can see my slides.

I hope that you can see the title of our presentation today. Absolutely fantastic colleagues joining us from all over the place. I can see. Fantastic. It's just past the hour. So we'll get started and begin with our presentation today as we talk about the structure of an academic paper.

It is our goal to help you become more effective as a writing and publishing academic. And structure in academic writing is very, very important as we go through this presentation.

Do feel free to put any questions that you may have into the chat box. We'll have lots of time at the end of our session today to provide you with answers to any of the questions that you may have. Any of the feedback that you may have. And indeed, if you've missed any of the other webinars in this series,

we do them every week. They're open to everybody. Anybody from anywhere in the world is welcome to join these events. They're not limited to anybody. We open them up. Anyone can come. Anyone can join us. We talk about all different topics. We talk about all different aspects of academic writing and academic publishing.

And of course, today we are talking about the structure of an academic paper. The goal, one of the goals is to make our writing as easy as possible. We don't want to have to work too hard when we put our papers together.

So one of the things that I hope that you'll get out of this training, this presentation, and indeed the other webinars that we give is that your writing can be made easier. We don't want you to have to work too hard. Writing is a skill that you can learn.

It's not, of course, something that you can be born with. So academic writing, we're also here, of course, to help you understand that we're going to put our papers together to make reviewers happy in order that they don't have to work too hard. Reviewers are happy. Everybody's happy. The paper gets accepted.

The paper gets published much more easily. So that's the goal of this. And here's a comment that I got back from a peer reviewer relatively recently at the journal that I'm the editor of. The reviewer actually said, I feel like in I feel like I'm in a museum at night.

There's great stuff in this paper, but I just can't work out what it is. And that's often what happens, unfortunately, when people get too focused, too close to their research areas. They write papers that, of course, are not so easy for other colleagues,

a little bit more distant to their research area to get into and to get access to. So our goal as academic writers is to make reviewers happy, to make it easy for reviewers to see the relevance and the importance of our study.

And we do that by staying focused, by organising our ideas in our academic papers, and by clarifying the language that we use. And that's why structure in academic writing, in academic article writing is so important. You've got great research. You've got great results. You, of course, wouldn't be

in the position that you're in if you didn't have great academic results. Ready now to put those academic results into a structure to keep your reviewers happy and to minimise the amount of work that you have to do as a writer.

And that's why, of course, it's so important to have three things in mind before you begin the academic writing process. Message, audience and structure. What's your message? What's the key takeaway message from your academic writing that you want people to gain when they read the paper?

That's the first thing. Audience, your target journal, where you're going to write the paper up and submit it. And the structure. We're talking about structure in this presentation today. But of course, the three things to know before you begin the writing process are intimately interconnected because you've got your message.

You've targeted a journal for your next academic paper. The target journal that you select gives you lots of information about the structure. Of course, different target journals have different structures.

And one of the best ways to determine what goes into the different sections of your next academic paper is to have a target journal in mind and mirror what you are going to write to other papers that have successfully been published in that journal recently.

So we want to avoid situations where our peer reviewers feel like they're in a museum in the middle of the night. There's great stuff in the paper, but I can't work out what that is. We are going to make our reviewers happy by focusing, organizing our ideas and clarifying our language.

And there's a number of key facts about your reviewers, about the people who are going to be assessing your next academic paper. They haven't got much spare time to read. Most of the articles that they look at are not essential for them. They read papers quickly.

And if they get frustrated, struggling to understand your ideas, then they're likely to give you a bad or negative or slightly less good peer review. So these are things to keep in mind as you begin to put your papers together, as you think about your readers.

So writers also often feel that they're in a museum at night as well. I can't get through all the stuff that I want to say about my research to get the way out, to find the way out. So, again, how are we going to do that? We're going to turn your data into compelling results that meet your stated research goals by helping you to structure your writing, by systematizing the process.

Stay focused, organizing your ideas and clarifying the language that goes into your academic writing. And that's how we make the writing process easier and more enjoyable for everybody.

And I know that it's difficult in a second or third or fourth language, but that's why we do these presentations. That's why we're here to help. That's why we put together these tips and tricks to help you make your English writing easier. So to begin with, let's take a step back from the article writing process and think about what your research statement is.

Your thesis statement, the objective of your academic article. What's the objective of your paper is the objective in the abstract, the last sentence of your introduction, the first sentence of your discussion.

And it's your guide throughout your article. You need to be sure about your objective. You need to be sure about what your statement is.

This is the message of your research paper. And this is why I talk about this being one of the three key things to know about before you begin the writing process. It's the objective. It goes in the abstract. It goes in the last sentence of the introduction, the first sentence of the discussion, and it's your guide throughout the writing process.

The key message, the key takeaway, the key outcome of your research study. So keep that in mind. Write that down before you begin to put your academic article together. It's very, very, very important.

And we base, we base the structure of our academic writing around these three questions. The how, the why and the what. What's the purpose of your study? Well, the purpose of my study might be, in this example, to find a new treatment for breast cancer.

What's the design of my study? Well, the design of my study is that compound X was extracted from plant Z and applied to cancer cells and mouse models of breast cancer. And I measured the effect. That's the design of the study.

What about the results? Well, this is important as well. Well, compound X treatment reduced the proliferation rate of breast cancer cells and tumour size in mice. And I hope that you can see that by using these simple techniques, we start to build up the structure of an academic paper thesis statement.

And then you answer these three simple questions, your purpose, why, the how, the design and the what of the work, as you build up your study towards having more information.

Keeping in mind, of course, as well, that you have selected an academic paper and you're basing your structure and the structure of your writing around another piece of work that's recently been published in your target journal. So here's my thesis statement. To find a new treatment for breast cancer, compound X extracted from plant Z was

used to treat breast cancer cells, mouse models, breast cancer, and was found to reduce cell proliferation and tumour size. In a shorter form, compound X from plant Z applied to breast cancer models reduced cell proliferation and tumour size and is a potential breast cancer treatment.

We've given you some other ones to editing and writing out those thesis statements, getting them shorter, getting them more refined to determine why second year students drop out of Geology 101 at higher rates than first year students. Class satisfaction was measured through a self-reported questionnaire. Lower

satisfaction with the class was correlated with an increased dropout rate. Self-reported satisfaction with Geology 101 was inversely related to dropout rate and analysis of second year students. You can see in these examples how we are going from a thesis statement to a title, a potential title for a piece of academic research.

I hope that that is making some sense. We are building from the thesis statement to a title.

Self-reported satisfaction with Geology 101 was inversely related to dropout rate and analysis of second year students. So, let's bang in on that, let's get involved, let's jump in there and let's start talking about how we would begin the writing process in terms of academic structure.

And often, almost always in fact, people start the writing process with the methods and with the results. What people don't do is they start at the beginning of the paper, keep writing until they get to the end. They tend to begin with what they know. Start with what they know. I always

do this in my academic papers, you probably do this too if you think about it. You start to write out your results. You start to put down what you know about your study, the work that you did and the results that you found. And this is the best way to begin. Start with the methods or with the results, but the key is actually to work on them at almost the same time.

And very often what you find, if you look at the structure of academic articles, is that the methods section and the results section tend to have similar outlines.

And this is very, very often the case in STEM, in science, technology, engineering, medicine and mathematics papers. The structure, often even the subheadings of the methods section and the results section are pretty much the same. So work with what you did, put your results down on paper, start by making figures,

start by making tables, describing your results, work with the methods and results at the same time. Consider making parallel outlines. That's a good technique to get you started with the writing process. Don't forget that you've got an academic journal in mind.

You know your message, you know your audience. That's your academic journal that you may have selected already. And you know now to start to build out the structure. So in your methods section, what's the most important thing to do? Make it reproducible.

The number one reason that academic papers get rejected throughout the peer review process, during the peer review process, is because of perceived or real issues in the methods section. So peer reviewers and editors look at the methods section and they think, I don't understand what the authors did.

I don't feel that I can repeat what the authors did. So make your methods reproducible. Keep the main things the main things. Don't get sidetracked into information that might not be completely critical to a thorough understanding of this particular piece of work.

Support your descriptions with details on models, data and statistical analyses and keep it in order. Data collection comes before data analysis. You've got to have a sequence. Your methods must be reproducible and keep your subheadings in a timeline sequence.

And by that, I mean your methods section needs to read like a sequence of events to the reader so that they can reproduce what they did in the study in a sequence. So what you did first, what you did second, what you did third, what you did fourth, what you did fifth and so on.

Your structure, important details, moving it from general to specific. These are tips for helping you to write an effective method section. It's got to be reproducible by other researchers. So describing experiments in the order that they are reported in the results, describing

experiments method by method and add any details that would enable repetition by other researchers. Remember, the main reason that articles get rejected during the peer review process is because of real or perceived issues in that fantastic method section.

So keep that in mind when putting your methods together. And as we talked about already, this is often the bit of academic writing that people do first. So when putting your methods together, you may be talking about models. You may be talking about variables.

You may be talking about controls or groups or sources of materials, assays, analyses and methods of reporting. You need to justify your choices of models and variables. Don't just assume that the reasons why you chose your models and variables are clear.

Remember, often reviewers, editors reject papers because of real or perceived issues in this part of the study. Naming your groups carefully, using the group variable names throughout the entire paper. Consider using short descriptive nouns so people understand what you're talking about.

So in an American example, we retained second year students would be better than writing, choosing to stay sophomore group, which, of course, means something to people in the United States, but is unclear to people everywhere else in the world.

So retaining second year students using source material shortcuts, we performed ELISAs following the manufacturer's instructions, adding a summary of procedure is important. So we'll tell people what you did, but you may have to put some further information in there as well.

Important details for animal experiments, ethic board review, treatment of animals, that kind of thing, informed consent, selection of subjects, statistical analysis, summary, significance thresholds.

Important details for animal experiments, journal guidelines for necessary information, preferably before making research decisions. Important details for animal experiments, ensure that your recruitment methods are explained, any potential biases addressed in the discussion.

You must have all important details for your experiments in your methods section, because without proper analyses, without proper significance thresholds, your data just can't be interpreted properly. Bulletproof, waterproof, it's got to have enough information in here so that other people are going to be able to repeat your work in the future.

Now, which tense to use? Past tense, the results showed, we found, the groups performed, past tense in the results, things happened, you're describing them, you're talking about them in the past.

First person versus third person, we, they versus it. Imperative may be okay when listing the steps in an algorithm, but otherwise you and your colleagues are the subject nouns.

It's much better in academic writing to use the first person. We did this, I did this, our team did this, because this is easier for other people around the world, reading the work, listening to the presentation are able to understand you more clearly. Remember that most people reading academic papers written in English around the world are not native speakers.

So making sure that they're able to more easily understand you is really, really important. And write in full sentences. Even lists require an introductory noun, verb, phrase. The following antibodies were used in this study.

For example, academic writing is a particular kind of formal writing, not super, super formal. Nevertheless, it must be correct and it must be easy for other people to understand. So that is also very important. And here's an example of how method sections and result sections often have parallel structures.

As you can see here from a real example, you can see the methods on the left and you can see the results on the right. And don't worry, we'll follow up with this webinar and recording and certificates for everybody so that you can have a look at these slides.

If anyone wants to email me personally and I'll send you the PowerPoint of this presentation, I would be delighted to do that as well. Your methods in parallel with results, the methods, the purpose, the models, the groups, the control, the treatment, quantitative. So data collection. Three experimental models and then treatments and analysis.

So data collection comes before data analysis and the same basic structure is used there in the results section on the right hand side. And this is very common in STEM academic papers. The results and the methods do tend to have the same structure.

If you don't believe me, you've never noticed this before. Have a look at some papers in your own subject area, because you will see this in the articles. The methods and results tend to follow the same structure. And for that reason, these are the body of the article.

These are the bits that people start off writing first. And once you've gotten the methods and results written, you're halfway there with the writing process. So in terms of results, of course, make it simple. Follow the methods. Don't include results for which there are no methods because that will be picked up

by peer reviewers and consider using similar headings in both sections, as we've already discussed. And a good trick here is one paragraph per result. I would make figures before you begin to write. Often, of course, as we've also discussed, this is the bit that people do first.

They finish a study. They finish an analysis. They make figures. They make tables. They illustrate the results of their study. They illustrate the outcomes of their study. And based on those figures, you can take one figure per paragraph, base the structure around the sequence in the methods section and talk about your figures.

One paragraph per result. And of course, each of those paragraphs has got to have a topic sentence and it's got to have a summary. But you can do it by basing those paragraphs around figures. Results of this analysis are shown in Figure 1. The results show X, Y and Z.

And then take it out into the discussion. Don't interpret your results in the results section. Present the results. Just the results. No interpretation. That, of course, comes later in your discussion section.

Interpretation and discussion are pretty much synonyms in English. So you want to avoid mission creep in your results section. Stick to the facts. No interpretation. And don't forget about your thesis statement. Refer back to that as you write.

Are you talking about things that directly result, directly relate to the question, to the statement that you are building your research paper around? Because if not, probably you don't need to include that information in your results. Stick to the facts. No interpretation. Refer to your thesis statement as you write and think, does every result support this thesis statement?

That's very important to have in mind as well so that you don't end up adding more information than is needed in your paper.

We've all read lots of academic articles like that where there's way too much information. So keep the compared groups together with the ones you are comparing them to. Compared to first year students, second year students reported greater satisfaction with the class. Separate groups with a superlative. First year students reported lower satisfaction with the class than second year students.

For example, these are techniques for writing your results section. Very important ideas to keep in mind. There's no right or wrong way to do this, by the way. All we're doing is providing you with tips.

All we're doing is providing you with techniques, with suggestions as to how to put your paper together. Keep groups and variables in parallel. Keep groups and variables in parallel with compared to.

Compared to that reported by first year students, class satisfaction reported by second year students was high. And compare a variable between groups, compare a variable between groups with a superlative. Self reports indicated that satisfaction with the class was lower in first year students than in second year students.

What I've done here is written the same thing in four different ways to give you ideas, to give you techniques that you can use when writing your results section to mix it up, to keep it different, to make sure that it's not just a blah, blah, blah, repetitive reporting as you take your results and put them together.

There are different ways to write those different sections. So in further examples, how can we use parallel terms, make different emphasis in our results? Here are some examples. Increased temperature caused a change in topography that was similar to the effect caused by increased water pressure.

The effect of increased temperature on topography was similar to that caused by increased water pressure.

So in formal writing, it's better to use similar to and in contrast, because these are more more precise than phrases like like and unlike was similar to rather than was like the effect. The effect of increased temperature on topography was similar to that caused by increased water pressure.

How to use phrasing, different emphasis to make your work come across very, very effectively. And we also recommend that you avoid using proved, consider using showed, suggested or indicated in your writing instead,

because proved proven I proved something I've proven something my results proved. This is very, very, very cut and dried in English. It's 100 percent this or the other.

What you would want to do probably is say something like my results suggest my results indicate my results showed rather than proved. If you're going to use the word proved, then you are going to need to tie that to a statistical analysis in order to be able to stand behind your use of that word 100 percent.

So we've talked about your thesis statement. We've talked about writing the aim of your study, the objective of your study. We've talked about building out the methods and building out the results. We do have lots of other content if you're interested in learning more

about writing these different sections or indeed get in touch with us directly. We'll provide you with support in your particular subject area. If you need help with writing a paper or editing a paper in your own specific subject area. That's also something that I will be delighted to do if you get in touch with me after this presentation.

Let's talk quickly about writing your discussion, interpretation, act as that museum guide. Explain what the reader is looking at. Explain what the results mean, how they answer the key questions.

The thesis statement, how they provide novel information or fill in knowledge gaps in the field. Remember, when you're starting a research project and you're thinking about what to work on. PhD students do this at the beginning of their PhD research. For example, they do literature review work in order to identify the key knowledge gaps within their field.

And then they work with their supervisor, they work with their thesis committee to determine which of those knowledge gaps would be the best use of time. The best use of resources, the best use of the lab group.

For example, you've got your thesis statement. Explain how your results answer those key questions. Provide novel information or fill in those knowledge gaps. And you do need to start your discussion section based upon your target journal. You know the structure by answering your question at the beginning.

Remember, your thesis statement should be in the first sentence of your discussion. So don't assume that the readers know that. Remind them of the gap, the novelty, the relevance of the study, and then convince them with facts. Connecting it all together, restating the question at the start of

the discussion, then giving the answer, noting limitations, explaining the relevance. This is what you're going to do in your discussion section. So don't repeat the introduction. You don't need to repeat the background information at the start of the discussion. That comes in the introduction at the beginning of the paper. Talk about that in a moment.

But you will need to provide details in this section about the relevance and novelty of the study and suggest any future directions for research in the future that may have come up, that may have resulted from this particular piece of work.

Why is that important? Well, if you don't and somebody else reading your paper comes up with those ideas for themselves, they won't need to cite you. If you put any ideas that you might have for future research into your discussion section, you have priority.

You have to be cited by future researchers in the field. So don't introduce background information again. That comes in the discussion in the introduction. Don't provide details about novelty and suggest future directions.

The why, the what, the how, limits and resolutions, future directions and a powerful summary at the end. Finish strong. Put the most important, most relevant information at the end of your paper. Why did you perform this study? What were the outcomes and how did you determine these findings?

Why did you perform the study? Repeat the thesis statement and hypotheses. Why are these important questions? What were the outcomes? What did you discover? What are the conclusions? What are the implications? And do your results answer any key questions or support your hypotheses?

How did you determine that in this sequence? This is a great template for writing your discussion section, as I mentioned already. We'll be very happy to give you the PowerPoint of this presentation at the end. So your discussion parallels the introduction.

And I hope that you can now see just how simple the structure of academic article writing can be with the methods and results. The introduction and discussion paralleling one another in structure, aims, purpose, methods, key findings and implications.

Aims, key methods, how, what are the answers and why does it matter? The shape is the same. The discussion on this slide on the left, the introduction on this slide on the right. And you will find this in papers published in your subject area.

This is how effective academic writers build out the structure of their papers. Mixing tenses. This discussion brings together the results, the past thesis statement, present implications and future. Connecting your paragraphs with simple terms like moreover, in summary, as

shown and use bold nouns and active verbs, active verbs, strong statements. This is not a time for weakness. In this study, we showed the method we used is the gold standard in the field.

Our findings will lead to improved yields for large scale production. Notably, however, in contrast, these results clearly showed we concluded that further research is needed to verify these results. Examples of tense use, examples of connecting words and examples of power terms,

ways in which you can get your writing across and make it more effective. What about the imperfect tense? You will use this in some cases in your discussion. The authors have disputed previous findings, arguing that bias was not considered in the results.

What about your introduction? Very important as well in this section. All and only salient points, your introduction. Very important papers are rejected when authors fail to explain how the results answer the research questions.

So set the study up effectively in your introduction. You make the case organized from general to specific and use deductive reasoning. Usually an effective, well-written introduction has three sections.

The question, the state of the art that surrounds that question. That's the background. And then a statement like here we show in this study, we show where you build out the beginning of the paper and link into the methods section. So try to avoid the curse of knowledge. Reviewers are experts in their respective fields.

Not all fields lay persons or first year graduate students should be able to understand your paper and appreciate the relevance of your findings. Bearing in mind, of course, that you're an expert in your field. It's easy to get into the weeds. It's easy to get too detailed with your paper.

You don't want to get too complicated. Avoid the curse of knowledge. Do not assume, do not assume that your readers know everything that you know. Laypersons, first year graduate students have got to be able to understand your premise and appreciate the relevance of your results.

So state the problem, provide a background, justify the methods, summarize the results, explain the relevance and give your thesis statement. Why is the paper important? What's the key question? How do your results answer that question?

These are pieces of information that you can put into your introduction. Why? What and how? The problem, the background, justify the methods, summarize the results, explain the relevance and provide your thesis statement.

You've got context dependent tenses, connecting paragraphs and references, of course, that go in there to justify the rationale, not a literature review. You don't need to put every single paper that's ever been published on a particular topic into your next paper.

It's not going to be a review paper. And even if it is, you don't want to summarize everything. Review papers are based around reviewing particular questions. So mixing tenses, making connections and providing the reader with relevant references.

Tenses, the mortality rate for disease X is increasing. Previous studies have showed that compound X was an effective treatment. In this study, we found that compound X was an inexpensive treatment. In general, self reports of satisfaction are accurate.

Therefore, questionnaires are typically used to determine study satisfaction. Students can conveniently fill them out in class. References need to be complete before submission and check the author notes and the journal style, because if there are issues with your references, you may get desk rejected.

Don't forget as well, define all abbreviations, follow the same pattern throughout the paper and try to avoid the use of words like never and always. Consider using typically, frequently or almost, because if you say things like never or always,

what if somebody demonstrates you to be wrong in the future? That is something that you can soften in your academic writing. So in summary from this presentation today, justify every decision that you take in your writing.

Every statement and every word serves a purpose. Choose them wisely. We of course can help with editing. We of course can help with word choice. Do get in touch with us if you'd like more help with your next academic paper. Don't assume that everyone knows as much as you do.

If they did, they wouldn't need to read your paper. Think in parallel. As we've discussed today, the introduction and discussion, the methods and results, they parallel one another. And if you keep your messaging consistent, it will make writing easier.

And use your statement, your question, your objective as your writing guide. These are tips for effective academic article structure.