how to write a scientific paper george whitesides

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How to Write a Research Paper

Writing a research paper is a bit more difficult that a standard high school essay. You need to site sources, use academic data and show scientific examples. Before beginning, you’ll need guidelines for how to write a research paper.

Start the Research Process

Before you begin writing the research paper, you must do your research. It is important that you understand the subject matter, formulate the ideas of your paper, create your thesis statement and learn how to speak about your given topic in an authoritative manner. You’ll be looking through online databases, encyclopedias, almanacs, periodicals, books, newspapers, government publications, reports, guides and scholarly resources. Take notes as you discover new information about your given topic. Also keep track of the references you use so you can build your bibliography later and cite your resources.

Develop Your Thesis Statement

When organizing your research paper, the thesis statement is where you explain to your readers what they can expect, present your claims, answer any questions that you were asked or explain your interpretation of the subject matter you’re researching. Therefore, the thesis statement must be strong and easy to understand. Your thesis statement must also be precise. It should answer the question you were assigned, and there should be an opportunity for your position to be opposed or disputed. The body of your manuscript should support your thesis, and it should be more than a generic fact.

Create an Outline

Many professors require outlines during the research paper writing process. You’ll find that they want outlines set up with a title page, abstract, introduction, research paper body and reference section. The title page is typically made up of the student’s name, the name of the college, the name of the class and the date of the paper. The abstract is a summary of the paper. An introduction typically consists of one or two pages and comments on the subject matter of the research paper. In the body of the research paper, you’ll be breaking it down into materials and methods, results and discussions. Your references are in your bibliography. Use a research paper example to help you with your outline if necessary.

Organize Your Notes

When writing your first draft, you’re going to have to work on organizing your notes first. During this process, you’ll be deciding which references you’ll be putting in your bibliography and which will work best as in-text citations. You’ll be working on this more as you develop your working drafts and look at more white paper examples to help guide you through the process.

Write Your Final Draft

After you’ve written a first and second draft and received corrections from your professor, it’s time to write your final copy. By now, you should have seen an example of a research paper layout and know how to put your paper together. You’ll have your title page, abstract, introduction, thesis statement, in-text citations, footnotes and bibliography complete. Be sure to check with your professor to ensure if you’re writing in APA style, or if you’re using another style guide.

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George Whitesides - How to Write a Paper to Communicate Your Research

An American Chemical Society interview with Professor Whitesides on the importance of writing in communicating research results to the scientific community, and the general public.

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Sep 13, 2020

How to write a paper?

Depending on the stage of your academic career, you might either hate or love writing. Regardless, you enjoy a good story. Writing a paper is like writing a story, even though it might not seem like it.

how to write a scientific paper george whitesides

As a college student, I used to despise writing reports and essays; I was driven instead to equations and numbers. Text just seemed verbose and inefficient, while numbers seemed rational and direct. Some of my friends were much better at blabbering through those reports. I simply couldn't be bothered.

During my Ph.D., I started learning the importance of “Writing in the Sciences,” when I enrolled in the course with the same title on coursera . I learned that journal articles (one of the foundations of academic research) did not need to be entirely dry and boring. They could be written in an active voice and used to convey a story.

As I began my postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. George Whitesides, I start understanding the value of writing as a way of expressing your thought process. In academia, if something is not published, it is as if it never happened. We have just published our first review paper from my lab (illustrated here) and about to publish our first primary paper (recently accepted). So, I figured that now is a good time to share the writing process ( as previously alluded to by my colleague Dr. Engelberth ).

During my postdoc, I learned that writing needs to be a part of the research process rather than simply being tagged on at the end. Using outlines is a great way to accomplish this objective. Just as I described for grant proposals , before typing up an outline, I typically sketch out a web diagram using a single piece of paper with all the major sections of the paper: introduction, results and discussion, conclusions, and materials and methods. It is useful to draw this web diagram early in the research process, for example, when you get preliminary results from your first set of experiments. For a review paper, you want to start with this web diagram if you already know the field. If you don't know the field yet, you want to perform a preliminary literature search focusing on the most recent review papers. I like using Web of Science because it allows me to filter results by article type, date, number of citations, etcetera, which is not possible when using Google Scholar and not as straightforward when using PubMed .

Within the web diagram, you want to write down what the section headings of each segment of the paper would be. A common tendency is to describe the research project chronologically; instead, you should describe your most important results first (although the materials and methods section could still be described chronologically). This approach is similar to how TV shows and movies sometimes start with the climactic moment to use as a hook and then spend the rest of the episode/movie explaining how the characters got there (e.g., see Netflix series Biohackers ). When writing a primary research paper, since you wouldn't have all your results yet, you want to sketch out the types of figures that you expect to get according to your hypothesis (and be prepared to revise the expectations if you find something different).

I used to think that the introduction of the paper could simply be written at the end after all the other sections were complete, but the intro is where you set up your story and following a defined format helps set the story well. As my postdoc mentor has explained in his paper , the introduction should answer the following questions in order:

What is the problem you're solving, and what is the answer? Jump right into it with the opening sentence if possible; don't spend several sentences beating around the bush.

Background: What has been done by you and others? This section is meant to be a short literature review of the most important and relevant pieces of work. You should use the section to cite appropriate references such that when somebody is reading your list of references, the titles of first five to ten references will explain what this paper is about, even without reading any of the text. This section is useful for citing how the problem has already been tackled by others in the research community or by yourself in previously published work. This space should also be used to list the remaining shortcomings of previous approaches; ones that you will overcome in the current work.

How are you solving the problem? Next, describe the highlights of what you have done in the current work and its significance.

Listing the above points on the web diagram help keep a cohesive story on a single piece of paper. We have a hard time remembering multiple ideas in our head simultaneously and thus having them listed in front of us is beneficial.

After sorting out the introduction section, you can focus on the results and discussion. Within the results section, you want to sketch out your most important results (or expected results) in the main text and decide what figures or tables you would use to convey these results. Designing figures and tables will take considerable time because you want to convey your message clearly (instead of just using these illustrations as a means of dumping data). There is an excellent series of articles called Points of View published in Nature Methods , which is a useful guide to consider when drafting figures for data visualization. The figures that convey your story should be used as the main figures, while all others should be presented in supporting information or appendices.

The discussion section (often combined with results) is where you would compare your work to that of others and provide the implications of your findings. Thus while the results section is mostly descriptive, the discussion section involves interpretation and comparison.

Building from the results and discussion is the conclusion section. Here you can list (I mean actually list in a numbered format) out the key advantages of your work compared to previous works. It is also a good place to list a few limitations that are yet to be overcome. Finally, you want to end on the note of the potential for this work in future studies or applications.

The materials and methods section is typically the easiest to write for any scientist/engineer because it is the most technical and it is describing the work that was completed. The key here is to provide lots of detail. With increasing scrutiny on reproducibility , this section needs to have all the details that would be required the reader to reproduce the experiments and findings. Since journals will often have word limits on the main text, supporting information or appendices are a good place to describe all the methods in detail.

Once you have drafted an outline, you can expect around 10 to 15 rounds of revision with your co-authors, before you are ready to submit the manuscript to a journal for peer review. One submitted, the manuscript will of course be scrutinized independently and will often require further revisions before it is finally accepted for publication. The whole process could take around 1-2 years of work and $100-200k in spending per paper. These papers together build a body of knowledge and advance science and technology.

In academia, peer-reviewed publications also serve as a metric of productivity. It is important to publish frequently and in good quality journals. Your authorship is public and your peers will use your Google Scholar page to determine what your most recent findings are. As a tenure-track faculty, my publications are an important component of my evaluation for tenure. As a student or postdoc, publications are used for evaluating your performance for a job (whether in industry or in academia as I described earlier ). The more you practice writing (and revising), the better you will get at it, and the less you will despise it. So, start writing!

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George Whitesides has published over 1,100 papers. In 2004 he published a three-page essay “ Whitesides’ Group: Writing a Paper ”. I have been asking all my students to study this essay when they begin to work with me. Now you can watch Whitesides on video explaining his approach to publishing papers.

Re:Whitesides on how to write a paper

Dear Zhigang:

Thank you for sharing this excellent video. I agree with him that "Writing is a part of the research process." Very beautifully said. I think this video can be extremely useful for anybody but one should keep in mind that this is an experimentalist and not everything he says applies to other fields.

Regards, Arash

Dear Zhigang,

Thank you for sharing the essay and video, this is really useful for somebody like me who is preparing to write his first article.

Thanks you for the video, it was very useful for me.

Thanks you

Quick guide

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comments at a glance

A 3-page guide to scientific writing

Planning to Write

Style & Format

Ravi Murugesan

There are many books on the topic of scientific and research writing, but most researchers hardly have the time to delve into such books. If only there was something concise and yet enlightening!

There is, actually. Try Whitesides' group: writing a paper . This is a 3-page paper on scientific writing that was published in the journal Advanced Materials in 2004.

Just 3 pages! Can it be any good? It should be. After all, the author, George Whitesides, is also the author of more than 950 scientific articles, is ranked 5 th in the list of 1000 most cited chemists from 1981–1997, and has the highest h-index of all living chemists as of December 2011. At MIT and Harvard University, where he has been a professor, he has mentored more than 300 students and scholars.

Prof. Whitesides must surely know a thing or two about scientific writing!

The guidelines provided in the paper have been used within Prof. Whitesides’ research group since 1989. In the manuscript, Prof. Whitesides explains the “ outline method ” of writing scientific research papers. He strongly recommends that papers be developed from outlines. An outline, according to him, should present the organization of the paper and include key data. A paper’s outline, he suggests, should be developed in an iterative process by a student and his/her advisor, and once the outline is finalized, the writing should begin. Commonly, students write a draft of the entire paper, only to receive significant corrections, revisions, and suggestions from their co-authors and advisors. Working on the entire paper draft after draft can be very time-consuming, and the outline method is clearly more efficient.

He reveals, “ All the writing that I do—papers, reports, proposals (and, of course, slides for seminars)—I do from outlines. I urge you to learn how to use them as well. ”

This is of course just a summary of the paper. You have to read the paper to learn what exactly an “ outline ” is and how you can make use of one in your writing process.

Prof. Whitesides also stars in a series of videos titled “ Publishing Research 101 ,” produced by ACS Publications ( ACS stands for the American Chemical Society ). Visit http://pubs.acs.org/ and go to the “ Video ” section of the website to access these very informative videos.

Of course, once you’ve written the outline, you might need some guidance through the process of drafting the manuscript itself. But let’s leave that for a different post!

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Published on: Oct 17, 2013

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COMMENTS

How to Write a Research Paper
Writing a research paper is a bit more difficult that a standard high school essay. You need to site sources, use academic data and show scientific examples. Before beginning, you’ll need guidelines for how to write a research paper.
How Do You Write a Discussion Paper?
A discussion paper presents and discusses in depth the issues that surround a specific topic. When writing a discussion paper, you must include thorough discussion of both sides of the topic being debated, reliable research and evidence reg...
How Do You Start Writing a Profile Paper?
As with any essay, the first step in writing a profile paper is to decide on a topic. A profile essay can be about a person, place or business, or even an event or activity. Profile topics should be interesting to research, observe and read...
Writing a Scientific Paper: One, Ideosyncratic, View
Writing a Scientific Paper: One, Ideosyncratic, View. George M. Whitesides. Department of Chemistry and. Chemical Biology. Harvard University.
Whitesides' Group: Writing a Paper
Whitesides' Group: Writing a Paper**. By George M. Whitesides*. 1. What is a Scientific Paper? A paper is an organized description of
Whitesides' Group: Writing a Paper
Insights into conducting research and the writing of scientific papers are given by Prof. Whitesides in this short essay.
Whitesides' Group: Writing a Paper
G. M. Whitesides. 2004. “Whitesides' Group: Writing a Paper.” Advanced Materials, 16, Pp. 1375-1377.
How to Write a Paper to Communicate Your Research
An American Chemical Society interview with Professor Whitesides on the importance of writing in communicating research results to the scientific community
How to Write a Paper to Communicate Your Research
Transcript · PYR101: George Whitesides - Improving your writing · Toward a science of simplicity - George Whitesides · Mix - PYR101: George
How to write a paper?
As I began my postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. George Whitesides, I start understanding the value of writing as a way of expressing your
Writing scientific papers Based on Whitesides' Group (Harvard
What is a scientific paper? ... Focus on organizing data not writing real data!
Whitesides' Group: Writing a Paper
... Robert Day (1983) gives, a-rather-stiff-definition of a-scientific-paper as: 'a-written and published-report
Whitesides on how to write a paper to communicate your research
George Whitesides has published over 1,100 papers. In 2004 he published a three-page essay “Whitesides' Group: Writing a Paper”.
3 Page Guide Scientific Writing
Whitesides' research group since 1989. In the manuscript, Prof. Whitesides explains the “outline method” of writing scientific research papers.