As a scientist, you are expected to share your research work with others in various forms. Probably the most demanding of these forms is the paper published in a scientific journal. Such papers have high standards of quality, and they are formally disseminated and archived. Therefore, they constitute valuable, lasting references for other scientists — and for you, too. In fact, the number of papers you publish and their importance (as suggested by their impact factor) are often viewed as a reflection of your scientific achievements. Writing high-quality scientific papers takes time, but it is time well invested.
As you may have noticed, however, many scientific papers fail to usefully communicate research work to their audience. They focus on the authors instead of on the readers by failing to clarify the motivation for the work or by including unnecessary details. Or they try to impress the readers rather than inform them. As a result, they are interesting to or understandable by only a small set of highly specialized readers. Effective scientific papers, in contrast, are interesting and useful to many readers, including newcomers to the field.
This unit will help you write better scientific papers in English. In particular, it will help you select and organize your content, draft your paper, and revise your writing so that your final paper is useful to a broad audience — not just a few specialists.
As a scientist, you are expected to share your research work with others in various forms. Probably the most demanding of these forms is the paper published in a scientific journal. Such papers have high standards of quality, and they are formally disseminated and archived. Therefore, they constitute valuable, lasting references for other scientists — and for you, too. In fact, the number of papers you publish and their importance (as suggested by their impact factor) are often viewed as a reflection of your scientific achievements. Writing high-quality scientific papers takes time, but it is time well invested.
