Writing #4--Organizing a paper
Bearing in mind that this blog is mostly directed at grad students, postdocs, and earlier-career professionals, I pick up here on some of my thoughts about writing. Writing a scientific paper is one of those things that we should have been taught systematically, but often were not. Often it's kind of hit or miss; we pick things up along the way, during thesis revision, etc. So if you are feeling a bit uncertain about some aspects of writing, this blog will help, I hope. One of the things you have almost certainly been taught, or already picked up on, is that scientific papers are expected to have a certain form of organization. The basic elements are Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion. In geology, if the length of the paper makes it easier, we commonly have a section titled "Previous Work" between the Introduction and the Methods. We also may have a separate section for "Conclusions", which follows the Discussion. I th...