Content of sections

Title:

• Should convey the "issue", the approach, and the system (organism).

• Format with sentence-style capitalization (i.e., capitalize the first letter of the first word, and nothing else, with the exception of Latin binomials such as Homo sapiens). Center on the title page.

• Avoid crafting titles with colons: they are clunky.

• Provide your name, institution, address, e-mail, and telephone and fax numbers below the title.

Abstract:

• Must be a miniature version of your paper, but most of all should explain to your readers why the experiment was done and why the question is of interest. Many journals limit the length of the abstract. Begin the abstract at the top of page 1.

• The first several sentences should attempt to interest the reader in the issue. It is useful to imagine a future reader who is predisposed to be uninterested in your topic, and thus imagine it is your job to convince him/her otherwise.

• Describe the general approach utilized to address the hypothesis.

• Summarize the main results briefly but without using p-values and t-values.

• Conclude with a general statement about the importance of the study.

Introduction:

• Aim for 3-5 paragraphs, and aim for a general audience that may not be familiar with your question, your approach, or your organism.

• Get your audience excited about the issue or question while using a minimum of background information and definitions (such things put the reader to sleep).

• Put your issue in the context of published, primary literature. Convince the reader that the experiment has not been published previously. See "Searching literature databases" for how to do this at Swarthmore College.

• Provide description and justification of general experimental approach and choice of organism.

• Give a clear statement of hypothesis and associated predictions.

• When citing primary literature, use the "Name-Year" system. For example (Darwin 1860). You do not need a comma after "Darwin" and you do not need a page number. When you are citing several sources at once (Darwin 1860, Jones 1861), arrange them chronologically and separate them by a comma.

Materials and methods:

• Fully describe experimental equipment and methods so that another laboratory could (1) find or make the reagents/equipment, (2) repeat your techniques, and (3) follow the same statistical approach.

• Describe the source (e.g., collection locality with latitude and longitude; company; colleague) and relevant characteristics (e.g., size, age, sex, genotype) of the biological material used.

• Include a description of experimental as well as control treatments, with number of replicates.

• Indicate, in parentheses, the manufacturer of specific reagents and equipment (e.g., Sigma Chemicals, St. Louis).

• Capitalize copyrighted names (e.g., Petri dish, Parafilm, Tween, Eppendorf, Clorox).

• Include information about location, day length, and (laboratory) temperature when relevant.

• Include photograph or drawing of experimental set-up if needed.

• Fully describe all statistical analyses that were used and how they allowed you to address the hypothesis. Indicate software package used (but only in parentheses); add the software's author(s) to literature cited section.

• Use the past tense throughout (e.g., "the data were collected").

• Avoid using words that reveal that the manuscript is the result of a "class assignment".

• Use the metric system (cm, g., 56 °C).

Results:

• First mention whether experiment worked (e.g., "90 percent of the birds survived the experimental treatments"), then describe further qualitative results if possible.

• In another paragraph, begin presentation of data analysis that more specifically addresses the hypothesis.

• Craft figure legends that stand on their own. A figure legend should be able to convey the general result to a reader if the reader were to look at figures only.

• Opt for figures whenever possible. Tables put readers to sleep.

• Inform the reader of any ignored data or "runs" that would otherwise alter conclusions (i.e., have you chosen, improperly, to present the only run out of 10 that showed a significant result?).

• Include leading zeros on all numbers with values less than 1 (e.g., p = 0.034).

• Include spaces before and after "=" to improve readability of statistics (e.g., p = 0.023).

• Refer to figures and tables parenthetically. For example, write "...the mean running speed of rats on fire was higher than that of control rats (t = 23.84, p < 0.0005, df = 19; figure 7a)".

• Label both axes of charts using sentence-style capitalization (e.g., "Mean running speed (m/s)").

• Remove extraneous boxes, tick-marks, lines, and symbols in figures. Rarely should you be satisfied with the "default" graphs of standard charting software. On rare occasions you may need to export the chart as a PICT file into Canvas or similar drawing program in order to get what you want.

• Figure captions (=legends) for charts should not contain "Results" sentences. I.e., do not give statistics in your captions. If you really, really, want to give readers a sense of statistical results, then put some asterisks or p-values directly onto the chart, perhaps accompanied by arrows. Then you could say, in the caption, "asterisks refer to post-hoc tests" (or whatever). The rule is that captions to figures must be only desriptive.

• Include sample sizes and treatment information in figure legends, but do not present statistics or results.

• Use significant, correlated, and normal according to their statistical meanings.

• Avoid discussion of the results in this section.

Discussion:

• Remind (without sounding like you are reminding) the reader of hypothesis and results, and quickly state whether your hypothesis was supported.

• Discuss why your results are conclusive and interesting. Be sure to convince the reader, not just yourself.

• Lead the reader through the logic of all of your conclusions.

• State relevance of your findings to other published work.

• State relevance to real organisms in the real world.

• Detail future directions that are possible, especially experiments that could expand or confirm your conclusions. (Repeating the experiment with a larger sample size is too boring of a future experiment, however.)

• Do not use p-values and t-values, and do not refer to figures or tables in this section.
  

Acknowledgements:

• Thank individuals for specific contributions to project (e.g., equipment donation, statistical advice, laboratory assistance, editorial comments on earlier versions).

• Mention the individuals, companies, programs, and government agencies that have provided funding.

• Be sincere but do not lapse too much into informality.

• Include people's names only, using abbreviations for first names (e.g., C. Darwin). Omit titles such as "professor", "Writing Associate", Mrs., and Dr.

Literature cited:

• Follow format described in Pechenik exactly. Note that biology publications differ in style from other sciences and especially from humanities and the social sciences.

• When citing a laboratory manual from a course, use the following format:
  

Swarthmore College Biology Deparment. Year. Laboratory exercise title. Pages xxx-xxx in, Biology 2 Laboratory Manual. Swarthmore College, PA.

• Note that in-text citation of above should adhere to the standard "Name-Year" system. (And, yes, this suggestion on format differs from that set forth in Pechenik's book on laboratory write-ups.)

• Use initials for first and middle names of authors.
  

• Include all authors' names for multi-authored papers.

• Format titles of articles and book chapters in sentence case. Only book titles and journal names appear in title case.

• Spell out journal names fully.

• Web citations for research results and facts are extremely undesirable, and are unacceptable unless approved by the instructor. In most of the cases there is primarly literature that can be used, and you should go to great efforts to find this literature (e.g., use all the databases to search for journal articles, ask for help from instructor, ask for help from librarians at Cornell). Note that many journals are available online, and thus the articles can be read online: these articles are not web sites.

• Web citations for genome databases, however, are acceptable. Here is an example of how to cite an internet source, if you have approval:

Miller, R.A. 2001. A position paper on longevity genes. Science of Aging Knowledge Environment. http://sageke.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sageke;2001/9/vp6 (2 August 2002).

[Note that the above URL is not blued or underlined.]

• Cite only sources that you have actually read. Reading only the abstract of an article (e.g., on an online database of primary literature) does not qualify.

General

• Do not use text quotations in scientific writing, even if you have been allowed to do this in other science courses or in high school. Rephrase with your own words.

• Make absolutely sure that you have properly attributed others' ideas and facts. Using phrases from your source material without quotations is plagiarism even if you cite the source at the end of the sentence. Mixing your own words with short fragments from your sources is called "patchwork plagiarism". Direct plagiarism, paraphrase plagiarism, and patchwork plagiarism will all buy quick trips to the College Judiciary Committee for knuckle rapping, instant failure of the course, and perhaps a suspension from the College.

• Do note mention or cite "lecture" or "laboratory manual". These are bad sources, and you should never, ever hint that your experiment was "just" an assigned class project.

• Check for spelling errors with spell-checking software and by rereading manuscript manually (to catch "their/there" and related errors). Professors get extremely irritated when write-ups are not proofed.

• Include page numbers at the bottom of all pages.

• Refer to your experiments and all cited experiments in the past tense.

• Attempt to vary sentence length to improve readability.

• Make sure all sentences fit logically within a paragraph, and that all paragraphs belong in the order that they appear. Take great care to use linking phrases between paragraphs so that your reader knows why a new paragraph has been started.

• Italicize the Latin binomials of all organisms (e.g., Cuscuta salina).

• After you have introduced the species' scientific name, refer to it thereafter in an abbreviated form to conserve space (e.g., C. salina).

• Fully spell out the genus name when a sentence begins with a scientific name, even if you have introduced the beast earlier in the manuscript.

• Use a serif font (e.g., Palatino, Times) for your text and tables. Non-serif fonts (e.g., Helvetica, Verdana) are fine, indeed desirable, for figures.

• Delete any ext ra spaces within and __between words, especially before and after __italicized__ text.
  

Word choice

• Pair all instances of data with plural verbs. Datum is the singular. You therefore should write, "data are", never "data is." It is of course true that many people, including some scientists, often say "data is", but the frequency of the error does not make it less of an error.

• Use "whether" and "if" appropriately. "If" means "in the event that" (a hypothetical scenario) and is rarely the appropriate word in scientific writing.

• Use "that" to specify a particular item. "Which" is used when you want to provide information that is not absolutely critical in defining the previous phrase of the sentence.

• Use "because" to indicate causality (e.g., "the cat purred because she was being fed"). Use "since" to indicate a timing issue (e.g., "the cat had not purred since the tragic boating accident in July").

• Use "e.g." (which is generally italicized because it is a foreign word, but not here because italics looks awful on the web) when you want to provide an example. Use "i.e." when you want to rephrase (i.e., to state more explicitly). These abbreviations are not interchangeable.

• Keep your manuscript completely free of slang, cliches, and contractions.

• Avoid, when possible, the ambiguous words "their", "they", "it", and "this".

• Avoid using "etc.". Instead opt for more complete listings of items.

• Use "effect" and "affect" correctly. Although you can effect change through civil disobedience, "effect" is not usually used as a verb. Usually, one means to say, for example, "The temperature affected the mean response times of the lizards" (i.e., it is a verb). "Effect" is not interchangeable with "affect".

• Resist the strange trend to use "woman" as an adjective (it's a noun). Say, "female professor" instead of "woman professor".
  

Useful literature

Alley, M. 1996. The Craft of Scientific Writing, 3rd ed. Springer-Verlag, New York.

Briscoe, M.H. 1996. Preparing Scientific Illustrations: A Guide to Better Posters, Presentations, and Publications, 2nd ed. Springer-Verlag, New York.

Day, R.A. 1994. How To Write and Publish a Scientific Paper, 4th ed. Oryx Press, Phoenix.

Matthews, J.R., J.M. Bowen, and R.W. Matthews. 1996. Successful Science Writing: A Step-by-Step Guide for the Biological and Medical Sciences. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Moore, R. 1994. Writing as a tool for learning biology. BioScience 44:613-617.

Pechenik, J.A. 2001. A Short Guide to Writing about Biology, 4th ed. HarperCollins College Publishers, New York.

Schlenker, R.M. 1990. Student research report writing. The American Biology Teacher 52:491-492.

Strunk, W., Jr., and E.B. White. 1979. The Elements of Style, 3rd ed.

Style Manual Committee, Council of Biology Editors. 1994. Scientific Style and Format: the CBE Manual for Authors, Editors, and Publishers, 6th ed. University of Cambridge, New York.

Tufte, E.R. 1983. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Graphics Press, Connecticut.

Internet links

Strunk & White's The Elements of Style

Careers in science writing (CASW)

Introduction to scientific writing (Bates College)

Science writing guides (University of Chicago)