Science Writing:  Nine Tips to Make Your Journal Articles Shine

Good science communication skills can be just as helpful when you are communicating with colleagues and journal editors as they are when you’re speaking to the public.

Here are nine helpful tips on writing journal articles by Anne Marie Weber-Main, PhD, and Anne Joseph, MD, MPH, from the University of Minnesota. You can find the complete presentation here.

1. Clearly state the importance of your findings. What gap in knowledge did you address? What challenges did you overcome?
2. Lead with your results, and then follow with explanatory details
3. Provide rationale for your study design and methods if relevant to the results
4. Include definitions of terms when appropriate
5. Present information in a logical order, not necessarily a chronological one
6. Use tables and figures for clarity and brevity
7. Be consistent with terminology (For example, use either “aggression” or “aggressive behavior,” but not switch back and forth between the two)
8. Similarly, using parallel sentence structure can be helpful when comparing methodology and results between data sets (helps the reader understand the similarities and differences when information is presented in a consistent way)
9. Make specific suggestions for how future research could expand upon your results

Adapted from:
Foundations of Scholarly Writing (Session 3)
Meeting Readers’ Expectations for IMRaD |Responding to Reviewers
By Anne Marie Weber-Main, PhD, and Anne Joseph, MD, MPH