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Authorship on Scientific and Scholarly Publications

The Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell applies the criteria for authorship outlined in GR098 Authorship on Scientific and Scholarly Publications. To view the entire policy, visit the Northwell Intranet.

Additional Resources - Articles

Basic Structure of a Scientific Paper Involving Experimental Work

Scientific papers that involve experimental work are structured chronologically in four sections: Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results and Discussion, and Conclusion.

 

The Introduction section clarifies the motivation for the work presented and prepares readers for the structure of the paper.1

The Materials and Methods section provides sufficient detail for other scientists to reproduce the experiments presented in the paper. In some journals, this information is placed in an appendix, because it is not what most readers want to know first.1

The Results and Discussion sections present and discuss the research results, respectively. They are often usefully combined into one section, however, because readers can seldom make sense of results alone without accompanying interpretation — they need to be told what the results mean.1

The Conclusion section presents the outcome of the work by interpreting the findings at a higher level of abstraction than the Discussion and by relating these findings to the motivation stated in the Introduction.1

 


Reference:

  1. Unit 2: writing scientific papers. In: Doumont J, editor. English Communication for Scientists [Internet]. Cambridge (MA): NPG Education; 2010 [updated 2014 Jan 17; cited 2015 Sep 1]. Available from: http://www.nature.com/scitable/ebooks/english-communication-for-scientists-14053993/writing-scientific-papers-14239285

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