So now you know in what order to write the sections of your manuscript. But what does actually go into them? Fear not, in this post I compiled guidelines on the contents of each article section. This is based on my own experience with publishing and mistakes I commonly see while editing or reviewing life sciences papers.
Title and Abstract. An important thing to remember is that your title and abstract should describe your findings as completely as possible. This means the abstract should contain a bit of background, rationale, methodology, key findings and conclusions. Both the title and the abstract should also contain keywords that describe your key findings as accurately as possible – this will determine how findable your paper is in search engines!
Introduction. Include only enough background information to set the stage for your research, identify a gap in knowledge that your paper is filling, and formulate clear aims. You don’t want to review the entirety of the literature related to the topic of your research. You also don’t want to include papers that contradict your findings – that’s something for the discussion.
Materials and Methods. Well, this is pretty self-explanatory. Increasingly, journals have guidelines on this, but as a general rule include enough details so that your experiments can be repeated without the need to contact you. If the method you're describing is well-established and commonly used, it’s OK to cite a paper that describes it instead of including all the details. If your research includes human subjects, tissues or animal models, then don’t forget to include information on approval from an ethics committee and/or the source of your samples.
Results. Divide your results into sections with titles describing key findings from a group of experiments. Start each paragraph with a short lead-in to connect to the previous paragraph and clarify why you carried out each step. Finish each paragraph with a short conclusion describing what the results mean. Avoid repeating too much background information or discussing the results at length.
Figure legends. If you look at highly cited papers in good journals, they usually have this thing in common: very detailed figure legends. Good figure legends are really key to understanding of the data without having to look into the text. As nowadays there isn’t always time to read the entire paper, many researchers skim the figures to get an idea of whether there is anything interesting for them in the paper. Give your legend a title that’s informative of the findings – that can usually be similar to Results subsection titles. For each panel very briefly describe the result and include details such as timepoints, concentrations of compounds, the method used to obtain the data, n numbers (if not apparent from the figure itself), the number of times the experiment was repeated, and statistical analysis applied.
Discussion. In this section compare each of your main findings to known literature and draw conclusions. Start with a short summary of the main findings. Next, ideally, divide also the discussion into sections – this makes text much more readable. Mention papers that confirm your findings and also those which don’t, and explain why. Comment on the bigger picture – what do the results mean in the grand scheme of the mechanism/disease you’re studying? Another important thing that is worth including in the discussion are the limitations of your research. It’s always good to be aware of them, and if you include them from the outset, it shows your readers (and reviewers!) that you really thought your study through. A common one that I’ve requested to be included as a reviewer is stating that only one sex of animals or human subjects/cells was used for a study, if indeed that was the case. This causes the findings to be potentially not relevant to 50% of the human population, and is a limitation that needs to be acknowledged.
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