Abstract
Many young researchers find it extremely difficult to write scientific articles, and few receive specific training in the art of presenting their research work in written format. Yet, publication is often vital for career advancement, to obtain funding, to obtain academic qualifications, or for all these reasons. We describe here the basic steps to follow in writing a scientific article. We outline the main sections that an average article should contain; the elements that should appear in these sections, and some pointers for making the overall result attractive and acceptable for publication.
If you are suitably qualied in methodology and statistics, then this section will not pose any problem. If you are less at ease with statistics, your project undoubtedly had methodological support from a qualied methodologist and/or statistician, so you may solicit their contribution for this section of the manuscript in order to ensure accuracy and exhaustiveness.
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A major question for many researchers when writing the results section is whether to describe the results in the text, or use a table or gure. While there are no strict rules for this, in general, results that can easily be described in one or two lines can be written in the text. Tables should be used for data such as baseline characteristics, outcomes, the same variables are being described for two or more groups. Tables also generally contain the most important results, and on their own, should be sufcient to give the reader a clear idea of your ndings. Figures are useful in cases where the source data is either too complex for presentation or not easily interpretable. Relationships and trends are amenable to graphical presentation in gures. There may be a limit to the total number of illustrations (gures and tables) that you are allowed, depending on the target journal, so again, check for guidance before including too many. Pay attention also not to include too many illustrations,
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4. The discussion section A suggested list of items to be covered in the methods section for retrospective and prospective studies is given in Table 3. As regards the tense to use for your writing, the methods should mainly be described using the past (imperfect) tense, i.e. we performed, we recorded, we measured, we tested. . . The pastperfect tense should be used to describe events occurring before your study, i.e. when thrombolysis had failed, we initiated. . .. 3.3. The results section
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The aim of the results section is to describe what you observed, without commentary or discussion. It is no longer necessary to describe the methods; this has already been done in the methods section, so just give the result. The reader will remember what methods were used if they read the methods section attentively. It is also unnecessary to comment, or interpret, so phrases such as surprisingly. . . or interestingly. . . are generally deemed to be out of place in the results section. You must describe a result for every method that was outlined in the methods section, and to make the paper easier to follow and read, it is good practice to present the results in the same order as the methods. Similarly, use of subtitles (again, the same ones as used in the methods section), can help to break down the results into easy-to-follow sections. A typical paragraph of results should start by recalling the type of analysis (e.g. QCA analysis revealed that. . .), then detail the results observ
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