Let Me Introduce You - The Basic Outline of a Scientific Paper

Part 1: The Introduction

Most researchers have read hundreds of scientific papers, even young ones. You might think that everyone would then understand the basic structure of all scientific papers. However, there are still a few issues that I encounter regularly. I wrote recently about the Results section (See "Results - What Results" below), but felt I needed to go over the other parts as well. So here we go.

Traditionally, a scientific paper had the following sections: Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion. Things like the Abstract and Conclusion were occasionally added, particularly the former. I want to go over the traditional sections, and then note where the publishing trends are going. The first section is always some sort of Introduction.

There are two major purposes for the introduction. The first is to go over the pertinent background in the area of research that is being presented. This does not mean everything that has ever been published on the topic! That sort of approach is saved for theses and review articles. The background in the Introduction goes over the most recent developments in field, particularly those closest to the work discussed, and highlights the unresolved issues from recent findings of others. One of those issues should become the hypothesis of the research you are publishing! That is the second purpose of the Introduction—stating the hypothesis of the research study! By the end of the Introduction the reader should know what the premise of the research was and why. This should take between 3-4 paragraphs, having 5-7 sentences each. If you go longer than that, which is permissible, then the research better be very complex and/or straddling more than one area.