How to Write about Scientific Research in Highly Citable Ways

How to Write about Scientific Research in Highly Citable Ways

Oct 01, 2024Rene Tetzner

How to Write about Scientific Research in Highly Citable Ways

No matter how significant the research you describe in a scientific article is and how passionately you wish to have a positive influence on your scholarly community, neither will earn you citations unless your research and your passion are presented effectively in an interesting and well-organised way. Readers (and this includes proofreaders and peer reviewers initially assessing your paper) have to be engaged by your writing and presentation and, once their attention is captured, it must be retained throughout the article, which also needs to be remembered as important and relevant to be cited.

For these reasons, any article you submit for publication should be designed to interest the reader immediately, and it should continue to captivate the reader’s attention through every one of its sections. An informative and catchy title combined with an accurate, concise and well-written abstract will accomplish the first, while smooth logical transitions between clear descriptions of background, methods, results and conclusions that emphasise the most revealing and significant details will cover the second. This is to say that your argument should follow a logical progression that will also make your research and discussion of it more accessible, more convincing and thus more citable. Interest and logic will together draw the reader through a well-written article from title to conclusion and even on to the tables and appendices beyond. Concise language is best when reporting methods and results, especially for readers with many demands on their time, which includes most scientists, and it also enables easy citation and quotation. Such an article is more digestible and more memorable, and only if your work and your presentation of it are understood and remembered as valuable by readers will those readers use and cite your article in their own research.

When writing up your research it is also essential to keep in mind that your text will stand alone (without your presence) when communicating with your reader, so your language must be accurate, professional, grammatically correct, precise and, when necessary, suggestive. For describing complex research, simplicity and clarity are most effective, difficult as they can be to achieve, and while unintentional and unnecessary ambiguity and uncertainty should be avoided at all costs, tentative conclusions, probable causality and other uncertain aspects of research and analysis should be clearly expressed as such.

Finally, it can be immensely helpful to share your article with a critical reader – a colleague perhaps, a professional proofreader or even a nonspecialist – to ensure that your written presentation of your research communicates what you intended and does so in clear and highly citable ways.

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At Proof-Reading-Service.com we offer the highest quality journal article editing, dissertation proofreading and online proofreading services via our large and extremely dedicated team of academic and scientific professionals. All of our proofreaders are native speakers of English who have earned their own postgraduate degrees, and their areas of specialisation cover such a wide range of disciplines that we are able to help our international clientele with research editing to improve and perfect all kinds of academic manuscripts for successful publication. Many of the carefully trained members of our manuscript editing and proofreading team work predominantly on articles intended for publication in scholarly journals, applying painstaking journal editing standards to ensure that the references and formatting used in each paper are in conformity with the journal’s instructions for authors and to correct any grammar, spelling, punctuation or simple typing errors. In this way, we enable our clients to report their research in the clear and accurate ways required to impress acquisitions proofreaders and achieve publication.

Our scientific proofreading services for the authors of a wide variety of scientific journal papers are especially popular, but we also offer manuscript proofreading services and have the experience and expertise to proofread and edit manuscripts in all scholarly disciplines, as well as beyond them. We have team members who specialise in medical proofreading services, and some of our experts dedicate their time exclusively to dissertation proofreading and manuscript proofreading, offering academics the opportunity to improve their use of formatting and language through the most exacting PhD thesis editing and journal article proofreading practices. Whether you are preparing a conference paper for presentation, polishing a progress report to share with colleagues, or facing the daunting task of editing and perfecting any kind of scholarly document for publication, a qualified member of our professional team can provide invaluable assistance and give you greater confidence in your written work.

If you are in the process of preparing an article for an academic or scientific journal, or planning one for the near future, you may well be interested in a new book, Guide to Journal Publication, which is available on our Tips and Advice on Publishing Research in Journals website.



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