Sunday, February 23, 2014

To learn how to organize your articles, study articles in high-impact English-language journals

In the fields that I'm familiar with—biology, biotechnology, and medicine—there is often a huge difference in the quality of writing between what is published in high-impact journals, and what is published in little journals. It seems to me that it's probably a positive feedback cycle: Because high-impact journals are more prestigious, more people want to publish there, so the editors can afford to demand clearer, better-organized writing. Because the writing is better, more researchers read the articles and find useful information and ideas in them. This leads to more citations, maintaining these journals' high impact factor. I think that it's not only the quality of the science that makes journals like Nature, Science, and British Medical Journal so popular and prestigious; it's also how clearly the ideas are presented in the pages of those journals.

The articles in these kinds of journals are worth using as models, even if you don't think that your study will be published in such a prestigious journal. First, you can be almost certain that the English in these journals is correct. Second, the way that the ideas are organized and presented in these journals will help you make your ideas clearer and more interesting to a wider range of readers, which will help your research get the attention it deserves.

I suggest that you find some articles that you find interesting in high-impact journals, and then make an outline of the main ideas in the article, to see how the authors organize their ideas. This will teach you how to outline and organize your own articles. To show you how to do it, I've made an outline of the main ideas in the introduction to an article entitled Oxytocin bolus versus oxytocin bolus and infusion for control of blood loss at elective caesarean section: double blind, placebo controlled, randomised trial (Sheehan et al. 2011) from BMJ (British Medical Journal).