Marybeth Shea Professional

Writing Program

Reading the

Research Article

A Guide to Document TypesAnd Special Formats

Marybeth Shea Professional

Writing Program

Research Articles

• Have a special format for economy • Use subhead titles, reflecting the

format, to help busy readers

• Are a special case of non-fiction for– Reporting findings– Placing findings against a stream of

information in the field

Marybeth Shea Professional

Writing Program

When did this all begin?

• 1665: when the French Journal des sçavans and the English Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society first began publishing the findings of their members and subscribers

• 1800s: many journals were founded as the proceedings of professional or learned societies

D. A. Kronick, History of Scientific and Technical Periodicals, 2nd ed. Scarecrow, 1976

Marybeth Shea Professional

Writing Program

Journal Article Genres• Letters (NOT Letters to the Editor)

• Research notes

• Articles

• Supplemental articles (often tables of data)

• Review articles (aka literature reviews)

Marybeth Shea Professional

Writing Program

Other Document Types?

Document types reflect editorial practices of each journal

Categories can include– Opinion pieces– Comment on policy or government– Debate or dialogue about a topic– Memoir about the practice of a field

Marybeth Shea Professional

Writing Program

Letters

• Letters (also called communications, not to be confused with letters to the editor) are short descriptions of important current findings; researchers use the letter to “stake territory” while the “findings article” is being prepared for publication.

• Note: The topic must be of interest and considered urgent.

Marybeth Shea Professional

Writing Program

Quiz: do you know what famous science discovery was first published as a letter?

Credit: A. BARRINGTON BROWN / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

DNA Helix Pubs

Marybeth Shea Professional

Writing Program

1) Letter by Watson and Crick about proposed structure of DNA appeared in Nature on 25 April 1953 Note: This Letter appeared with two articles by Kings College colleagues. Rosalind Franklin’s key work is included herewith.

2) Appearing in Nature, five weeks later, on 30 May 1953 was the fuller paper. Odile Crick’s drawing is included here.

1) A fuller version of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London in 1954.

Marybeth Shea Professional

Writing Program

Odile Crick’s redering of the double helix. Appearing in the Nature article, courtesy of the NY Times.

Crick’s rough sketch. Included in the Crick Papers collection of the Wellcome Trust

Marybeth Shea Professional

Writing Program

Research Notes

• Research notes do not carry the timely import or weight of Letters.

• Research notes are – Short descriptions of current research

findings or – Updates on ongoing research of interest

to others in the field.

Marybeth Shea Professional

Writing Program

(Research)* Articles

• Articles are usually between five and twenty pages and are a complete description of current original research findings.

• Note: Considerable variation on length exists between scientific fields and journals.

.

* Aka ‘Findings’ (sometimes Canadian or British)

Marybeth Shea Professional

Writing Program

Supplemental Articles

• Supplemental articles contain a large volume of tabular data or graphs; these visual displays are the result of current research and may be dozens or hundreds of pages with mostly numerical data.

• Note: Some journals now only publish this data electronically on the internet.

Marybeth Shea Professional

Writing Program

Review Articles

• Review articles do not present original research but, instead, consider the results of many different articles on a particular topic.

• The best review articles or literature reviews develop a narrative (story) about the state of the art in that field.

Marybeth Shea Professional

Writing Program

Previewing Move

•The Abstract

Marybeth Shea Professional

Writing Program

2. spec. A summary or epitome of a statement or document. Also attrib.

1528

1799

1715

1867

1863

1962

1959

1927

     

      

      

      

      

      

      

      

      

      

      

      

1528 GARDINER in Pocock Rec. Ref. I. I. 117 We send herein enclosed, abstracts of such letters as hath been sent to the pope's holiness. 1715 BURNET Hist. own Time (1766) II. 82 I will give you here a short abstract of all that was said. 1799 WELLINGTON Lett. (G.D.) I. 34 In the abstracts, it appears that the strength of the..forces consisted of 48,000 men. 1863 COX Inst. of Eng. Govt. Pref. 8 Copies or abstracts of State papers and records. 1867 SMYTH

Sailors' Word-Bk. s.v. An abstract log contains the most important subjects of a ship's log. 1927 [see ABSTRACTOR]. 1959 L. M. HARROD Librar. Gloss. (ed. 2) 12 Abstract. I. A form of current bibliography in which contributions to periodicals are summarized... When published in periodical form they are known as journals of abstracts. 2. The individual entry. 1962 Lancet 19 May 1068/1 Have you ever tried doing abstracts? I once did  for about a year. It was the American articles that caused me the most anguish.

‘abstract,’ an entry in the OED

Marybeth Shea Professional

Writing Program

IMRAD

•Introduction •Methods & Materials •Results •Analysis •Discussion

Marybeth Shea Professional

Writing Program

Introduction

• Why, where, and by whom is the study undertaken?

• What is the purpose?

• Whose work does this current research build on?

Marybeth Shea Professional

Writing Program

Method (and Materials)

• How was the study done?

• What materials and methods were used?

• What variations of standard techniques were used?

Marybeth Shea Professional

Writing Program

Results

• Findings typically appear in tables, graphs, or other visual formats.

The

meat and potatoes

of the document.

Marybeth Shea Professional

Writing Program

Analysis

• The analysis focuses on the findings and numbers, identifying relationships and patterns. In the background of any research article lurks this question: What does it all mean?

And significance, courtesy of MW(A Preview of the Coming Attraction!)

Marybeth Shea Professional

Writing Program

Discussion

• What do the results mean?• Why does it matter?• What should be done next, based on

these results?

• FINALLY: How do the findings fit in with what other researchers have found?

Marybeth Shea Professional

Writing Program

Acknowledgements:

• Read more about IMRAD by checking out Charles Bazerman, a rhetorician.

• OED! (really, more in a moment.)

• Jonathan Buehl, Jeanne Fahnestock, Bill FitzGerald, Henning Leidecker, and Michael Winett.

Marybeth Shea Professional

Writing Program

9. A literary composition forming materially part of a journal, magazine, encyclopædia, or other collection, but treating a specific topic distinctly and independently. (Here the idea of a section or part of the book, is quite subordinated to that of the independent character of the ‘article.’ It is one of the articles in the paper, as distinguished from the articles of this Dictionary.)

1749

1712

c1870

18501822

     

      

      

      

      

      

      

      

             

      

      

1712 ADDISON Spect. No. 452  5 They read the Advertisements with the same curiosity as the Articles of publick News. 1749 FIELDING Tom Jones VIII. i, The home articles of a newspaper. 1822 MISS MITFORD in L'Estrange Life II. vii. 151 Charles Lamb's articles, signed ‘Elia.’ 1850 THACKERAY Pendennis xxx. (1863) 257 Warrington..pointed to one of the leading articles in that Journal. c1870 KINGLAKE Crimea I. (ed. 4) Advt. 13 The book..became the subject  not merely of reviews, but also  of what they call ‘articles.’

‘article’ entry in the OED

Marybeth Shea Professional

Writing Program

6. A daily newspaper or other publication; hence, by extension, Any periodical publication containing news or dealing with matters of current interest in any particular sphere. Now often called specifically a public journal.

1791-

182317851728

1890

1865

1800

     

      

      

      

      

      

      

             

      

      

      

1728 POPE Dunc. I. 42 Hence Journals, Medleys, Merc'ries, Magazines. 1785 CRABBE Newspaper 170 Our weekly journals o'er the land abound. 1791-1823 D'ISRAELI Cur. Lit., Lit. Jrnls., The Monthly Review, the venerable (now the deceased) mother of our journals, commenced in 1749. 1800 Med. Jrnl. III. 107 To the Editors of the Medical and Physical Journal. Ibid., To merit insertion in your very useful Journal. 1865 Sat. Rev. 7 Jan. 15/2 The opinion of this journal has been already more than once expressed on the subject. 1890 Spectator 21 June 875 The personalities and weedy gossip of the Society journals.

‘journal’ entry in the OED

Marybeth Shea Professional

Writing Program

Playfair first published The Commercial and Political Atlas in 1786, in London. This self-published book contained 43 time series plots and one bar chart, a form widely thought to introduced in this work. One of William Playfair's piechart in his” Statistical Breviary,” depicting the proportions of the Turkish Empire located in various political and ethnic territories of the Middle East, is thought to be the first pie chart. Tufte acknowledges Playfair’s work

Marybeth Shea Professional

Writing Program

Spence, Ian. “No Humble Pie: The Origins and Usage of a statistical Chart. “Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics. Winter 2005, 30 (4), 353–368.

1801 pie chart from Playfair's Statistical Breviary; available now in The Commercial and Political Atlas and Statistical Breviary, Cambridge University Press 2005.

William Playfair (1759–1823) Architect

Marybeth Shea Professional

Writing Program

http://www.exploratorium.edu/origins/coldspring/ideas/printit.html

http://www.springerlink.com/content/vv25l78ppp2h6264/fulltext.pdf

Marybeth Shea Professional

Writing Program