Science Writing
Ideas and information are at the heart of science, so it’s no surprise that learning to communicate clearly is an essential part of learning science. Even a brilliant experiment will have no impact unless it is shared widely among other researchers.
Below on this page are some general tips for writing scientific papers. For more detailed information, consult the specific topics outlined in the navigation bar on the left. (Please note that the citations in the examples are for illustration only, and these sources cannot be found in the references.)
Science Writing Guidelines:
Effective science writing must be:
Precise and detailed: When describing an experiment, it’s not enough to give your readers the basic idea of what you did. They needed to exactly what hypothesis was tested, how it was tested, and what results were obtained.
Don’t say: “We measured the size of robins.”
But rather: “We measured body mass of 26 American robins (Turdus migratorius) collected in mist nets in Nicholas Sheran Park in Lethbridge, Alberta between Sept. 30, and Oct. 15, 1999.”
Now you’re giving your reader much more information on what species you studied (common names are not reliable), how many birds you looked at, plus where and when and how you looked at them.
Logical: When making an argument, make sure your reasoning is sound, and show your readers each step in your logic (don’t assume they will “make the leap” with you).
Don’t say: Isley and Isley (1996) found corn kernels had more energy essential vitamins than wheat kernels. Therefore we hypothesize that larger ants will be more successful foragers.
But rather: Isley and Isley (1996) found corn kernels had more energy and essential vitamins than wheat kernels. Redding (1994) demonstrated that only ants longer than 1 cm were able to carry corn kernels. Therefore we hypothesize that ants longer than one cm will be more successful foragers where corn is present.
To a researcher studying ants it might be obvious that only large ants will be able to carry large seeds such as corn kernels. Someone less familiar with the field might not follow this step.
Concise: Space is limited and so is the attention span of your readers. Although you need to pack a lot of information into your paper, you should try to be as brief as you can, without omitting important information.
Don’t say: Although we knew of many ecological factors that could potentially have affected the distribution of our subject organism, prickly pears (Opuntia polyacantha), in the coulee that we observed for our study, our group decided to choose competition and soil moisture content as the subject of our study for Biology 2200. We decided to focus on competition and soil moisture content because of the fact that previous research has shown it to be important for cactus growth. Several researchers (Brown 1990, Franklin et al. 1994) have found other factors to be important for cactus growth, including temperature and sunlight, but these studies were not done on mixed grass prairie ecosystems. Studies which were done on mixed grass ecosystems found the result that soil moisture was the most important factor.
But rather: Our study focused on the effect of soil moisture and competition on the distribution of prickly pears (Opuntia polyacantha) in the mixed grass prairie near Lethbridge, AB. Although soil moisture, temperature and sunlight have been shown to affect cactus growth (Brown 1990, Franklin et al. 1994) previous research on mixed grass prairie ecosystems suggest soil moisture is the most important factor in this climatic zone (Gaye 1995, Everley and Everley 1987).
Notice that the second paragraph has all the information contained in the first, but avoids longwinded phrases, and repetitions. The shorter sentences in the second passage also make it easier to read.
Organized: Like any piece of writing, a scientific paper tells a story. Because the story is often complicated, and depends on understanding many details, careful organization of information is essential. A paper which is rambling or disjointed will be misread, or more often, not read at all. Research papers typically follow a general format known as IMRAD (introduction, methods, results, discussion). This provides a basic organizational “skeleton” for papers which is easy for all readers to follow.
In the proper style: One frustration for students learning to write science papers is the seemingly endless list of styles and conventions which must be followed, from the IMRAD format of the paper (see above)down to details such as writing genus and species names in italic font. These conventions may seem arbitrary and fussy, but they are designed to help make papers more understandable and communication more precise. For example, the citation style (used in the examples above) is designed to make it as easy as possible for readers to know when the author is drawing on previous research, and then to track down those previous papers. Unfortunately, styles are not completely consistent among different scientific disciplines and different scholarly journals, so writers must find and use the appropriate style for each paper.