Scientific Writing

Writing

Write in complete sentences. Make sure there are no grammar mistakes. Use your spell-checker. Be sure to proof read your writing. The spell-checker won't catch mistakes such as using "there" instead of "their," or "its" instead of "it's," or "effect" instead of "affect." Make sure your thoughts are organized in a logical manner. Start and end different sections of the paper with introductory and concluding sentences.

Formatting

The paper should be double-spaced. Single spacing is not acceptable. Have a cover sheet listing the title, the authors, date and the class the assignment is for. All figures and tables should be numbered, and they should be numbered in the order in which they are discussed. Have one set of numbers for tables and another set of numbers for figures. When you refer to these tables or figures in your text, refer to them by number. You may either embed figures and tables within the text, or you may have them all at the end of your paper.

Have a reference list at the end of your paper. The recommended format for references is: Author (date) Title, Publisher, Pages. For example:

Lemke, K.A. (2002) Geomorphology Lab Manual (4th ed). UWSP Geography/Geology Department, Stevens Point, WI.

Be sure to cite any information or ideas that you get from someone or somewhere else. Citations provide validity to your statements. More citations help make your arguments stronger. Citations may either be embedded within a sentence or they may be placed at the end of a sentence. For example, you could say that we followed the methodology outlined by Lemke (2002) for completing our fieldwork. If you place a citation at the end of a sentence, then the entire citation goes in parentheses (Lemke, 2001). The period goes after the citation. You don't need a page number unless you have a direct quote, in which case the quote should either have quote marks at the beginning and end, or if the quote is long, it should be in its own paragraph, single spaced and indented from both left and right margins.

Headings

Divide your paper into sections and provide a heading for each section. If you need to divide major sections into subsections, pick a format that distinguishes major section headings from minor section headings. For example, major sections headings might be centered, bold and all capitals, while minor section headings might be left aligned, bold and upper/lower case. Basic sections you often see in scientific papers in the earth sciences include:

Introduction

Background or Literature Review

Study Site Description

Methodology and Data Analysis

Results

Conclusions or Summary

Reference List

The first section should always be an Introduction. In the introduction, state the objectives of the project. Explain what you hope to accomplish, or state the hypotheses you plan to test. Explain the importance of the work to the discipline; in other words, why is this important to the field of geomorphology? Why do we need to know this stuff? Why should we care?

The Literature Review or Background section should be a critical review of past research related to the objectives of your project. You always need to put your own research in the context of past research; any research we do is building on research others have done before us. That past research allows us to establish expectations on what we should find. Because of the difficulty in measuring certain processes within the time constraints of a lab period or a single field day, it is important to establish expectations before you start analyzing your data. Without this background information, you have no way of knowing whether your results are reasonable or not given the methodology you used to test your hypothesis. You want to summarize the findings of other researchers who have tested hypotheses similar to yours or who have worked to solve problems similar to yours. If the results of these previous studies are not all in agreement, you should discuss reasons on why this might be the case. Different outcomes may result depending on the methodology the researchers used - the instruments they used, the locations where they took measurements, and the frequency with which they took measurements. Different outcomes may result due to differences in the local environmental conditions - the local soils, geology, climate, vegetation and landuse. Different outcomes may also result due to random chance, or to factors that we don't know about or that we can't control. Different outcomes may result because some environmental processes are too complex or occur at temporal and spatial scales that we are unable to measure. The Background section should be organized by ideas, not by studies. In other words, if you find five studies that have tested hypotheses similar to yours, don't summarize study one, and then summarize study two, and so on. Instead, look for ideas, methodologies, analyses, and conclusions that are common to all the papers and organize the Background section by these ideas.

The description of the study site should include its location and any information on the local environmental conditions that might impact the outcome of your project. Photos and diagrams may be quite useful in this section of your paper. For example, the descripton of our river wading study site should include your profile of the river channel.

In the Methodology section explain the steps taken to complete the project. This is an important part of the scientific method: explaining what you did and how you did it so that others can repeat the experiment. Valid scientific experiments are experiments that are repeatable and if you don't explain what you did and how you did it, then other scientists can't repeat the experiment. You need to state what instruments you used to take measurements with, and where and how often you took measurements. You need to state the final nature of your data - what does your final data set look like - what variables are included and how many observations do you have for each variable? If you use some field measurements to calculate other variables in your final data set, you need to explain what calculations you did and what formulas you used for those calculations. You do not need to include your data set! If you have hundreds of observations, other scientists don't want to look at your raw data, but they do want to know what information that data set contains. If your data set is small or if the raw data are important to some aspect of your paper, you can include the raw data in an appendix.

The results section is where you report on your analyses of the field data you collected. This is where you present any graphs or charts or statistical analyses of your raw data. As you report your findings, you should always relate your findings back to the findings of other researchers (which you summarized in the Background section). If your results do not match your expectations based on past research, be sure to discuss why this might be the case. Did we use a different methodology? Did we collect appropriate data to test our hypothesis? Did we collect sufficient data to test our hypothesis? Did we conduct our experiment in a different environmental setting?

In the Conclusion, you should come back to the objectives of your project (which you should have stated in the Introduction). Did you accomplish your objectives? If so, briefly summarize your findings and how they support, complement, or refute past research. If you didn't accomplish your objectives fully, state some reasons why and provide some suggestions for future research that would allow you or someone else to accomplish those objectives.