For the majority of the PhD students writing a paper or an abstract can be a nightmare. No ideas to write something on the white screen in front of you?Don’t worry! You don’t have to adopt your imagination or to be an excellent writer, just follow the following order.
- Results section: Start collocating graphs and tables, highlight the main funding and comment your results, take attention of comparison with previous works.Try to vary the expressions adopted, i.e. “As shown in figure X”, “illustrated in Fig. X”, “cf. Fig. X”, “reported in Fig. X”, “As can be seen in fig.X”, “Fig.X shows”, etc.
- Methods section: This is the simplest one, just list everything that can be considered useful to describe your results. Experimental set-ups (providing technical details and if necessary photos or schemes of them), techniques and software adopted, criteria for analyzing your data and so on.
- Introduction section: The critical parts of the paper! Remember to accurately reports previous results, to underline what we know about the topic, what is missing and how you suggest to solve the problem.
- Discussion: It is a summary of your results, listing main findings and indicating some possible future works or limitations of your study.This structure is usually called IMRD (Introduction, Method, Results and Discussion).And finally… take your time to decide the title. Adopt the keywords to resume the relevant information, but be concise. Prefer a traditional noun phrase, but with a maximum of three words and avoiding ambiguity!
Roberta Manno, University of Zaragoza
