Marian Mamdouh Faculty of Engineering Electronic and communication department How to write a scientific paper The Most Important Part of Your Paper: The Introduction • The 1/3 – 2/3 Rule from a reviewer’s perspective: ▪ 1/3 time to read your introduction and make a decision. ▪ Remaining 2/3 time to find evidence for the decision. ▪ A very important part. Many reviewers have an idea on rejection of the paper right after reading the introduction.
• What to cover in the introduction
▪ The research problem. ▪ The motivation of your research on the research problem. ▪ The claim of your contribution. ▪ A summary of your evidence to support your claim. ▪ The significance of your contribution. ▪ An outline of the rest of the paper. Introduction: the five-point structure 1. What is the problem? 2. Why is it interesting and important? 3. Why is it hard? (e.g., why do naive approaches fail?) 4. Why hasn't it been solved before? (or, what's wrong with previous proposed solutions? How does ours differ?) 5. What are the key components of our approach and results?
• A final paragraph or subsection: “Summary of
Contributions”. • It should list the major contributions in bullet form, mentioning in which sections they can be found. The Introduction The introduction should answer the following questions: 1. What was I studying? 2. Why was this an important question? 3. What did I know about this topic before I did this study? 4. State the method of investigation and the principal results of the investigation. 5. What model was I testing? 6. What approach did I take in this study? General rules • Use the present tense when referring to work that has already been published, but past tense when referring to own study. • Use the active voice as much as possible • Avoid lengthy or unfocused reviews of previous research where cite peer-reviewed scientific literature or scholarly reviews. • Avoid general reference works such as textbooks. • Define any specialized terms or abbreviations. Introduction • Common Mistakes
– Too much or not enough information.
– Unclear purpose. – Lists. – Confusing structure. – Poor thesis statement. Introduction: Example Although they did not know of the germs the animals might carry, residents of US cities in the 1860s and 70s cited the flies, roaches, and rats who swarmed the tenements in arguing for community sanitary programs. In the 1950s vermin provided justification for housing and health agencies to pursue urban renewal, and also gave tenant activists a striking symbol of officials’ neglect of their neighborhoods. Today, though we know that vermin produce indoor allergens, and we have pesticides designed to keep vermin at bay, the fact that both may be hazardous confuses parents, health officials, and other advocates who seek to protect health. As long as people have lived in cities, pest animals have joined us in our homes and buildings, affected our health, and propelled our policies on the urban environment. The social geography of pests, however, reflects the social position and physical surroundings of our neighborhoods.
The researcher’s objective is to use the ecological history and social geography of pest animals, which have been blamed for several kinds of disease exposures throughout the past two centuries, to investigate how health and environmental conditions are connected with poverty in cities. Literature Reviews • A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. • A literature review, research review, or related work section compares, contrasts, and provides introspection about the available knowledge for a given topic or field. • It allows you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research that you can later apply to your paper. • When you start writing a literature review, – The most straightforward course may be to compile all relevant sources and compare them, – Perhaps evaluating their strengths and weaknesses. • While this is a good place to start, your literature review is incomplete unless it creates something new through these comparisons. What is the purpose of a literature review? • When you write a research paper, you will likely have to conduct a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. • The literature review gives you a chance to: ❑ Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and its scholarly context. ❑ Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research. ❑ Position your work in relation to other researchers and theorists. ❑ Show how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a debate. How to write a Literature Reviews How to write a Literature Reviews • Here are some steps that will help you begin and follow through on your literature review. • Step 1: Choose a topic to write about (focus on and explore this topic). • Choose a topic that you are familiar with and highly interested in analyzing. • A topic your intended readers and researchers will find interesting and useful. • A topic that is current, well-established in the field, and about which there has been sufficient research conducted for a review. This will help you find the “sweet spot” for what to focus on. How to write a Literature Reviews • Step 2: Research and collect all the scholarly information on the topic that might be pertinent to your study. • This includes scholarly articles, conventions, conferences, dissertations, and theses—these and any other academic work related to your area of study is called “the literature.” • Step 3: Analyze the network of information that extends or responds to the major works in your area; select the material that is most useful. • Use thought maps and charts to identify intersections in the research and to outline important categories. • Select the material that will be most useful to your review. • provide the essential information of the article that pertains to your study. How to write a Literature Reviews • Step 4: Demonstrate how these concepts in the literature relate to what you discovered in your study or how the literature connects the concepts or topics being discussed. • For a literature review, highlight the concepts in each article and showing how they strengthen a hypothesis or show a pattern. • Discuss unaddressed issues in previous studies. These studies that are missing something you address are important to include in your literature review. • In addition, those works whose theories and conclusions directly support your findings will be valuable to review here. Tips on drafting a literature review • Categorize the literature into recognizable topic clusters: – stake out the various positions that are relevant to your project, – build on conclusions that lead to your project, or – demonstrate the places where the literature is lacking. • Avoid “Smith says X, Jones says Y” literature reviews. • Avoid including all the studies on the subject. • Avoid polemics, praise, and blame. Literature Review: Example #1 • Other studies also support the conclusion that traditional teaching methods hinder learning calculus. Selden, Selden, and Mason, conclude that isolated, trivial problems, the norm in many classrooms, inhibit students from acquiring the ability to generalize calculus problem-solving skills (Selden, Selden, and Mason 1994). Similar results are reported by Norman and Prichard (1994). They demonstrate that many learners can not interpret the structure of a problem beyond surface-level symbols. They show that novices have inaccurate intuitions about problems which lead them to attempt incorrect solution strategies (Norman and Prichard 1994). Because they cannot see beyond high-level features, they can not develop correct intuitions. On the other hand, successful problem solvers categorize math problems based upon underlying structural similarities and fundamental principles (Silver 1979), (Shoenfeld and Herrman 1982). These categories are often grouped based upon solution modes, which the experts use to generate a forward working strategy • (Owen and Sweller 1989). Literature Review: Example #2 Increasingly, the research community is turning to coupled land-surface-atmosphere-ocean models with dynamic modules to achieve the realism necessary for climate studies. Most of the studies to date have incorporated equilibrium vegetation models into climate change simulations (e.g., Neilson and Marks 1994, VEMAP Members 1995 . . . ; but see Foley et al. 1998 for an example of climate simulations with a DGVM). It is recognized that the next stage is to include dynamic representations of the terrestrial biosphere. In this context, VEMAP Phase 2 model experiments will provide a unique opportunity to assess the effects of climate change on the hydrologic cycle and the water balance of regions on a continental scale, and how vegetation dynamics mediate those responses.
