Be prepared

Let's start with a question:

What is the first question you should ask yourself before writing you manuscript?

A: What is my most important finding?

B: Can my study be replicated?

C: Why dose my study matter and to whom?

D: Which journal should I publish in?

Answer:

Why dose my study matter and to whom?

Because you understand why that finding is important doesn't mean your reader will. Unless they have the right context to appreciate its importance.

Keep in mind. We're writing our papers for readers, not for us. We know what we've done. Our job is to communicate that value.

What we should do before we start?

Ask yourself these questions:

How dose our study fit in to the body of knowledge?

How does our study fit in with what's already known in the field.

Who could actually benefit from our ideas.

Three steps in planning your manuscript.

Step 1 identify your audience

who do you think is going to be interested in reading your paper?

What do they already know about your topic.

What terminology are they familiar with.

Global vs regional

when you try to public a international journal, you should ensure that the ideas or questions or problems that you are trying to address will be interest to people around the world.

Broad vs. specialized

Specialized: Will you include people only in your specific research area. If so you should publish in a specialized journal. And you don't have to really give abroad introduction.

Broad: If you think your study will be of interest to people at other research areas or maybe even other fields, now you should be publishing in a broad focus journal. You have to more broadly introduce your topic so they can really appreciate the context. Be careful about what types of terms would be familiar or appropriate for them.

Academic vs. non-academic

IF you think the people outside of academia, industry, policymakers patients, or the general public are interested in reading your paper, you should be pubishing in an open access journal.

Step 2 identify the focus

Help ensure they don't feel confused or lost.

Here are 3 factors to focus your manuscript:

1. What are you investigating? (variable, condition, strategy)

2. What are you measuring. (Outcomes)

3. From where are those measurements taken from? (sample)

Step 3 Structure your narrative

Q: Why we should write academic paper as a story.

A: Cause people like stories. If we are familiar with the structure of your story, that means it much easier to follow that logical flow. If it's easier to follow that flow, we can really appreciate the importance or the value of your work. If I can see the value of your study has for me, it's going to help keep my attention because I want to read about it in details.

Let's see the technique of three parts of the story:

Start:

Setting the scene, and introducing the conflict.

Point: There should be an important problems in the filed. "What is your research questions", "How is related to your target audience".

Middle:

Conflict unfolds. The majority of the plot where hopefully the different characters are trying to overcome that conflicts.

Point: How can you plan to overcome the problem. "What is your aim?"

End:

There is going to be some sort of resolution where these characters had overcome that conflict.

Ensure your resolution or implication need be relevant for you target audience.

Point: when you're writing your conclusion, think of it as an answer or a solution to the problem you identified earlier, because this helps to make the value of the study a lot more clear.

Example of a paper: clear logical structure with 3 factors

Research questions:

The conventional pixel structure in full-color displays consists of three, laterally arranged sub-pixels that limits opportunities for resolution enhancement.

Aims:

In this study we developed a new photolithography-based strategy to vertically stack pixels to improve OLED display resolution.

Conclusion:

We developed a thin-film transistor-driven vertically stacked full-color, high resolution (>2000 ppi) OLED using a photolithograph processed intermediate electrode.

Exercise:

Try to identify the variable, outcome and sample

Problem 1:

Although the roles of glucose in T cell metabolism and diabetes are well characterized, the function of D-mannose in T cell immune responses in diabetes remains unknown.

variable: D-mannose

Outcome: T cell immune responses

Sample: Diabetes

What's the aim?

In this study, we evaluated if high levels of D-mannose suppressed immunopathology in a diabetic mouse model and increased T cell responses in these mice.