Wildlife By The Numbers Episode 7 Structure of a Scientific Paper Part 1

In this episode of Wildlife By The Numbers, Matt and Grant, a duo who has been co-authoring papers together for over a decade, give a candid discussion on publication to share your work. They have a lively discussion of how they write a scientific paper, and dive into the Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion sections of a paper sharing how their writing was influenced by their professors as well. They have saved the abstract, editing, proofing, and deciding which journal to submit to for another episode.

Quotes from this episode...

"Writing is the backbone of what scientists do, and it's extremely important to write up what you're doing and present that in a format that has been reviewed by other scientists. At the most basic level, folks can understand that you wanna share your knowledge. But there's a number of reasons why you want to write a scientific paper, have that go through a a rigorous peer review, and then publish it. One of them is, as I just said, you wanna share the information so others can learn from it and others can build off it and improve and contribute to the field of wildlife biology or ecology or whatever science your your discipline you're working with and advance that field, help folks understand the issue that you're working on because it may it may spur other questions that they have or help them with the work that they're doing. Scientific writing also in that peer review process also brings credibility to your work."

"Why in the world do we use such a format? Why is it not like if I do a presentation at a scientific meeting, I may do some methods and results to discuss that, and then start over again. And do that multiple times even for one smaller type that might be a chapter in a thesis or dissertation. I'm not gonna roll all my results together and talk through all those individual results and then discuss all of them afterwards, it just doesn't flow very well. So why in the world do we do it that way?"

"What Stuart has impressed upon me is in your introduction, you have the first three hundred words is what's gonna grab your reader. And in that first three hundred words, you should speak to what the issue is that you're addressing, why it's important, why it matters, and then how you resolve it. So the first three hundred words, what's the issue? Why does it matter? And then how do you address it? And that's how he taught me to write it."

Episode music: Shapeshifter by Mr Smith is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/