Today, February 12^th, is Darwin Day, the 210^th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, probably the most famous scientist to have ever lived.

Increasing volumes of new information are constantly added to the existing medical literature because of new research and data collection, as well as novel clinical experiences.

Plagiarism involves not citing the source of the material, or citing the source inadequately or inaccurately. So how do you make sure that your journal submission is not delayed or rejected due to plagiarism? This article discusses simple ways to avoid plagiarism in academic writing.

Many authors and researchers worry that their academic writing is too repetitive, but repetition can be a useful tool when used correctly. It is important in developing academic manuscripts, it can benefit readers, and is encouraged (in appropriate contexts) by editors and publishers.

At some point, we all take notes for our research. It might be jotting down the results of experiments, pulling out the key points from a text, or setting out the key points made by a speaker at a conference. You might already have excellent note-taking skills, but it’s easy to miss something important, or end up with notes that make little sense when you return to them months or even years later.

If you’re running interviews or focus groups as part of your research, you’re going to end up with plenty of audio, or perhaps video, which needs transcribing.  If you’ve ever tried transcription, you’ve probably found it can take a surprisingly long time, and there are inevitably bit of audio which you find yourself puzzling over – what exactly was that word?  Who was speaking then?

Research produces data, and as researchers, we develop the skills to interpret it and draw out the details, the trends, and the correlations, that are of interest.  For a wider audience, we need to present the data in a way that makes these important points as clear as possible.  Publishing in a journal, readers don’t want to have to wade through all the data to see whether the arguments stand up.  When writing for a general audience, it’s even more important to present data in an easily digested manner.

The purpose of a literature search is to obtain an overview of the current state of the field; that is, what is currently known about a specific topic and what questions remain unanswered. There are a variety of reasons why you may wish to perform a literature search over the course of your research career.

The main purpose of the title of your academic research article is to quickly and clearly convey the most important overall conclusion from your study; essentially, it is a one-sentence summary of the entire study. 

The introduction to an academic article is the first section of the paper, immediately following the abstract. One of the most important functions of an introduction is to answer the question ‘why?’: why was the study performed, and why is it interesting and/or important? 

The Methods section is the part of a scientific paper that describes how the study was carried out. This section describes each technique that was used in the study and any relevant details about the materials, subjects, and so on. Some journals refer to this as the ‘Materials and Methods’ section, and some clinically-focused journals will refer to it as the ‘Patients and Characteristics’ section.

One of the most important decisions you will make when writing an academic paper is how to present your data; that is, which data should be placed in tables, which data is best shown in figures, and how to make both of these display items as clear and as easy to interpret as possible. Presenting data in figures and tables instead of describing it in the text enables you to quickly and easily convey large amounts of complex information, and enhance and even accelerate reader understanding of your paper.

An abstract is a brief paragraph at the beginning of an academic paper that provides an overview of the article. As such, it acts like a ‘mini’ version of the paper and follows the same structure as the main text.

Getting a response from a journal you have submitted your paper to can be a tense moment: the decision to accept, reject, or revise is a major step in the publication process. Much of the feedback received at this step will be about the scientific content of your paper.

Reference management tools are software programs that can help organise and cite references for academic writing. They serve as “virtual libraries” in which you can store hundreds of references to published papers that contain all of the relevant publication information, such as author names, journal names, volume, issue, page numbers, and more. 

Using punctuation in English-language academic writing is important to help ensure that your intended meaning is conveyed as clearly as possible. In addition, using punctuation correctly gives readers (including journal editors) a good impression of the quality of the paper, which can affect the perception of the quality of a study. In this post, we will talk about some of the common mistakes and misunderstandings around punctuation in English paper writing and how to avoid them.

Once you have performed your initial literature search and are satisfied with the list of references that you have retrieved, the next step is to evaluate this list of potentially relevant papers in more detail to determine which are most pertinent to your topic of interest. 

 Our goal as writers is to keep people interested and have fun!

Module 2 talks about including descriptive statistics in academic papers. In order to decide which descriptive statistics to include in your paper, and how to include them, it is important to revisit what descriptive statistics tell a reader about the data. Even if you are not using quantitative data in your own papers, as a consumer of research it is important to understand what descriptive statistics are and know how to interpret them when you read scholarly papers that include them.

Tune in to our webinar module to learn more.

This module is about telling a story with your data. It explains how to supplement the text with visuals that are informative, non-repeating and easy to understand:

●Are there any data that readers might rather see as a display item rather than text?

●Do your figures supplement the text and not just repeat what you have already stated?

●Have you put data into a table that could easily be explained in the text such as simple statistics or P-values?