Speaker 1: So let me begin by introducing myself and our service. So our company is called Essay Review and we do edit essays but we also mostly edit research papers. So we do research papers, dissertations, manuscripts, journal cover letters, anything that you might need for universities for submission or for research or journals etc. And before we go on I'm going to tell you a bit about myself. So I am the managing editor at Essay Review and what my job is is to edit papers and also to check what other other editors see and how they edit. So personally I have a degree in a master's degree in English. I am NOT a scientific researcher but I have edited hundreds and hundreds of scientific manuscripts. So what we're going to talk about today is going to be about writing quality. So we're not going to focus on research or how to do research but how to make your research paper better so that you can get good grades and you will be able to get into journals and get your work published. That's the point right? So the content of the lecture today we're going to start with an overview of what is research writing. We'll then talk about the structure of the research paper, what parts it's composed of and you'll see there's four parts. And following that we will talk about composing each section. How do you start from the beginning and compose each section? And then we will discuss some tips for improving the quality of writing. Okay so the question we want to ask first is what the what is the point of the research paper? What's the purpose? As you might know the main purpose is to share your knowledge, share the knowledge you've gained in your study with others, especially with researchers. You want to show how your study fits into the current science and if you're writing for a popular journal such as Science or Nature or one of the more the popular science journals, then you're going to be informing the public, so regular people not just researchers. So let's talk about four important factors of research writing. Now this is not research itself but research writing. So first factor we're going to consider is coherence and that means including all of the necessary information in every section. What is the necessary information? We will get to that later. It means not repeating the information. So writing we see many times writers use the same phrase again again again. It looks very unprofessional so you want to try to avoid that. The next factor is organization. The organization is basically the structure the IMRD. Who has heard of IMRD or IMRAD? Have any of you heard that? This structure? Maybe once you know what it stands for you'll know. IMRD stands for Introduction Methods Results Discussion. So that's going to be what we will discuss today. It's the body of most research papers. You want to put the right content in the right place. Okay so that's what we're going to show you how to do that. The third factor of writing is relevance. Relevance means a lot of things but it means conforming to the length guidelines. It means choosing the right data. So for example if you have a research paper that's 4,000 words you don't want to write ten results or ten methods. Probably you want a smaller amount of methods. So what the exact answer is it's it's really up to you but you want to make sure that you're the in the research methods and results you include are relevant and most important. The most important methods. Most important results. Fourth factor of writing is clarity. Clarity means writing clearly, writing elegantly, and nicely. So it should be easy to read and understand. Your paper should not be a struggle. I understand the English is not most of your first languages your first language so we don't expect in most journals don't expect you to get the language perfect and when you send the manuscript to editor, they just edit for grammar and for clear communication. They cannot change the structure of your of your paper so this is going to be up to you but as far as clarity goes we can help you with that as editors. So you need to use proper grammar, phrasing, and style and not too too many extra words. Okay this below I don't know if you can see but this is kind of a golden rule for all rules. You want to check the formatting and style rules of your target journal. So if you have if you're applying to I don't know Bioscience Monthly you want to read everything about about for about authors or for authors section and you want to read as many articles as possible to get a sense of what their articles look like. Okay so now that we've discussed that let's talk about research writing structure. So basically there are four main parts in most research papers that you need to follow and they're usually in this order and that is introduction, methods, results, and the discussion. Sometimes you have a concluding paragraph. You've probably seen this structure before I imagine but maybe you haven't learned learned exactly what to do with them. I mean who here has written a research paper for a journal? Raise your hand if you've written a paper for a journal. Okay a couple of you. How about have you written a research paper for a class? 영어 논문을 샀어요? 수업에게? For class? If not then yeah this is a really good lecture to attend because we're going to be talking about the basics but even researchers who have written many many articles can still benefit from learning how to to write how to write these sections better. So your information actually moves from broad to specific and back to broad. So this is the shape of the research paper. You notice it has a sort of funnel shape. So you start with the introduction, what is known, the basic topic that you're going to discuss, and you quickly move into the literature. What is what is unknown? What are the gaps in the literature? And in the middle here you can see this is your hypothesis. So you're going to give a very short statement about what your research study is doing. What's the purpose of it? And your methods and results section as you can see here methods and results are the shortest. They're the shortest part of your paper but they're the most compact. They have the most data. And at the end your discussion is a bit longer. So this is the structure. Okay so let's talk about each part in particular. And this is the order that you will usually read a research paper. So the introduction, what does it do? Introduction discusses the problem that you're going to research. It discusses the background and describes how your research fits in to the known information. You also see a lot of primary literature introduced. So a lot of citations and that is the introduction is the place where you see the most citations. This study you know Smith and and Burke 1995 right those citations for other studies you see introduction. Okay the methods quickly tell you how you did it tells how you did the study and which materials and methods of experimentation which methods of analysis you used. The results explain the important findings of your study. They do not discuss the importance of the findings they simply talk about what you found what your methods found. And finally the discussion and explains what your findings mean why are they important and what are the implications for other research. It also can talk about limitations you know if you study about farming and you study about cows you do a research about cows you could say you know this study applies to this kind of cow but it might not apply to other cows. So these are limitations you need to include and you can discuss possible research in the future. All right so let's do our first quiz and if you know the answer just raise your hand anytime you don't have to wait for me to finish and I'll try to choose whoever is first. Okay which one your quiz is not in the PPT there's no answer. Okay which one is not a factor that affects quality of research writing? Is it A. coherence B. clarity C. novelty D. organization C. novelty are you sure that's right right good. So you can get a coupon afterwards if you like. So novelty might affect your research right you want to do a study of something that hasn't been done before but you don't want to write in a crazy way you know it's not a creative writing course right so you don't want to be the one that writes you know and it's in a novel way you want to follow the rules. Okay number two what does the discussion conclusion section do? A. presents the findings of your research B. gives the context and background of your research C. explains the meaning of the findings includes implications and limitations D. discusses how your study was conducted. Yes C. discussion explains the meaning of the findings ding-dong-ding-dong that's right. Okay so in the discussion is where you talk about why your study is important and we'll show you how to do that. Moving on let's talk about how to compose the paper. As you saw earlier I don't know whether to move over here or stay here I might move later. Okay so even though your introduction comes first you actually begin with the methods section you're going to write that first and then you will write the results the discussion and finally the introduction and the reason for this is so you don't leave anything out in the introduction you don't include something you know something new in the discussion that you didn't introduce. So everything all of the main meat of the paper should be introduced. It's like a summary right summarize what your study is going to do. You're not going to put exact figures and data about your study but you're going to discuss what your study yielded what you did. Okay and before writing your paper you should you should know what your hypothesis is and you should know what your research questions are. So for example what did this study seek to find. One example of this question is the study sought to find how many university students are satisfied with their school's facilities. Okay another question you need to know the answer to what is your studies main arguments or questions. For example this study how many students report satisfaction with materials what are the most common complaints students make about the universities. I'm sure you have some common complaints in your mind but if you're doing a study on on universities and satisfaction with the university classes this would be one of your main questions. You should find the answer to this question in the results. You also want to decide which audience or journal you're writing for. This really the only way to know how to do this is to is to read the articles in the journal or if you're applying for a conference to research that conference and see what other authors how other authors write. That's about all we can say about that. Okay so the first thing to do before actually writing the section is to prepare the figures and tables. This is the your core data this is the most important aspect of your research paper right. So you want to gather and create and gather everything in one place. So you have your data you're gonna make it into figures and tables. You've probably already done that before you put a pen to the paper. Then you want to give those data captions and numbers. So you want to put them in order so you know what order you're going to be writing about them when you write the methods and results. Right so place them in the order you have because your paper will just be writing in the sentence this data. I'm just gonna make sentences out of the data. That's what a paper is really. All right so in the second step you're going to write the method. So this is really the first part of the paper. Here's some questions you should ask. How is the study carried out and analyzed? In this section you should describe experiments, explain why procedures were chosen, why you use this method of analysis, or why you took this sample. Explain how your results were analyzed. And this is usually the order. I'll show you here actually. Organization. Okay so the first the first content you will write about is your materials that you used. That means where you where you got your materials and if you do sample study what your sample is. Is it adults aged 25 to 30 or is it children? So you're going to put that right away in the beginning. Second you're going to discuss how materials were prepared. What did you do with the materials to get ready to study them? Third how are your measurements made? Okay you can talk about the techniques you use to measure your your data. And fourth what methods of analysis did you use? You get into more and more detail as you go on. Okay and here's some rules. You usually want to just if you think about it chronologically. So what did you do first? We did this first and then we did this and then we did this. That's a good way to organize. Also when you do the results your results should be in the same order as your methods. You can also organize it from most to least important. So if you have methods that are you know very very central put those first. Methods of analysis. If you have other methods of analysis the details are not the most important but you might want to you know tell your reader about them then you know put them last. Your methods section is only about 10% right? It's very short 10% of your paper. It could be longer than that it might be 20% but generally speaking methods is shorter than the other parts. In this section these are in red you can see some grammar rules. It's not it's not like a hard rule but generally speaking most journal articles use will use passive voice and past tense for the methods. It's not again many teachers will say professors will say use active voice but we still find that in the methods passive voice and active are used but you should try to be consistent with your voice. Do not discuss the results okay don't talk about what you found just how you found them and be sure to use quantitative details in addition to your techniques and methods of analysis. The first thing you're going to do is to create a list of your materials and methods. This means if you know what you used for your study just make a list of them. So in three groups you have materials and sample. Let's just say you have you used 100 grams of potatoes, a cheesecloth, a distilled water. Okay it's a very simple experiment, very simple study. Your next group is your preparation. So in a little phrase what did you do? You skinned the potato with a knife, you got catecholase extract, you blended the potatoes and water, you stored in 13 degrees Celsius refrigerator for 24 hours. So list all of the things you did and also list your methods of analysis in phrases. Spectrophotometer used to measure optical density, I recalibrated it using signal linearization. Okay so it's not a sentence yet. So from this you can write the information as a sentence. So notice A and A are the same but we've just written A in a sentence form. So a plain cheesecloth, pure distilled water and a hundred grams of raw potatoes were purchased. Notice that you have your your materials in sample at the beginning. Next in preparing the catecholase extract a hundred grams of potatoes were skinned with a paring knife, washed and diced, etc etc. So and again in red we have the verbs they're in past tense and passive voice so you can see what they how to put them in that in that tense. And last you have your methods of analysis. A spectrophotometer was used to measure optical density and calibrated using signal linearization. Now you're ready to write your methods. So you're going to separate the different methods into different paragraphs. So this is one paragraph. If you have methods of analysis you might you might separate this into a paragraph as well. So it's try to keep your paragraphs separate based on the methods that you used in the methods of analysis that you used. Okay so we're going to look at a sample. This sample I chose is from Public Library of Science PLOS. You can find you can find free open source open access journals on this site open access papers. So this one is about kimchi. I thought it would be nice to do a sample about kimchi. So let's start with the heading. This student starts with a heading sample preparation. Now you don't need to use a heading. You might be able to use it but not all journals use headings obviously. But if you can it's helpful to show the reader that to organize your paper and show the reader where what you're doing in the upcoming paragraph. So the first thing that this researcher does is discuss materials site and sample. 20 kimchi samples made from Korean or Chinese kimchi cabbage were acquired via online markets. Okay so we have the where they're from and what the materials are. And then you have the exact place where they were were procured. They came from Gyeonggi, Chungcheongbuk etc. And then the Chinese kimchi samples were purchased in the same month. So you have the place and where in China they were purchased right. And before we go on this these were all one sentence or one paragraph. So I've separated them so you can see the different parts. But I just I made it separated. Okay sorry about my Korean. Okay the next thing you'll do is explain the preparation. How you prepared the materials. So you're gonna have a lot of verbs here. A lot of verbs. Each head of kimchi cabbage was cut. It's an action verb. The cut kimchi samples were stored in sealed bags. The samples were frozen using liquid nitrogen and then ground using electronic blender. The ground samples were stored at negative 80 degrees Celsius using Maldi TOF MS analysis. Okay so again you have passive voice and a lot of different verbs. This is this is a style issue but it will help your your article not be so boring and repetitive. If you use the same verbs again again again it's not really fun interesting to read. Okay so let's look at the second part of methods. We won't read everything. I'll just try to go through important parts. So again this author notice the sub the heading Maldi TOF MS analysis. So what are what is this paragraph about? Well it's going to be about this method of analysis. It's really easy to know if you're you know skimming through the paper you can see where this information what this is. So you start with how the major measurements and calculations were made. Start with the broad methods first. So Maldi TOF MS analysis was performed in triplicate for kimchi samples without protein extraction. And then you have this is how how this was done in order. First kimchi samples were mixed and homogenized using one-to-one ratio etc. And then later on you have further details about the analysis methods. So it explains the range of mass spectra and the extraction times etc. So you have all these like these little quantitative details later. So don't necessarily don't put these first. Start with the the method of analysis first. How did you do it? And then later you can discuss further details about how you how you analyzed your data. Okay what do I have here? Provide quantified details and measurements. Okay so not just a lot of many. Most. The majority of. Use numbers. Can use a lot of numbers here. Okay so we have one-to-one ratio 30% 2,000 to 20,000. You can you can see this. Alright so the third one the third part of the methods they have mass fingerprinting analysis. So this is the second method of analysis that they discuss. And here they break it down into PCA, principal component analysis, and HCA. You'll see this later when we look at the results. In the results section they will have the same order PCA then HCA. List the analytical methods first, quantified information second. So you have the methods and in blue is some quantified data. Again HCA was used, how it was done, and here's the the values in blue. And again this is one paragraph so the author has squished it together but sort of it's it's micro-organized right. It's got it's still got this the each each each method of analysis separated but then the details are put after it. But it will be a one this is one paragraph in the original. Okay so methods quiz. Let's see if you remember what I just said. What statement about method is not true? A headings are sometimes used in the method section. B methods are organized chronologically and in order of importance. The methods section describes how experiments are done or D the methods contains information about research findings. Which one is not true? Yes you sir. What's one? D? Last one? Which is not true? The methods contains information about research findings. That's right. Wow you guys are three for three. Nice job. The methods contains no information about findings just how you did the the experiment or how you did the study. Which is the best example of a sentence found in the methods? Many people get this got this wrong or maybe it's my fault but there is one that is the best based on what we just talked about. So try to keep that in mind. A. 54 men ages 30 to 39 were placed in wooden chairs. B. The spectrometer readings were 58.99 nanometers respectively. C. Cancer is a leading cause of death in the United States or D. Researchers should place slides under a 300 times microscope. Yeah. Which one? A? First one? I think you're the first one to get it right the first time. Nice job. Yeah why why do you think that's why is this the best answer? Yeah yeah right good thank you. It's clear like what the the sample is right? This is actually maybe near the beginning. Well it's how the the sample was the procedure was undertaken right? And we have our sample 54 men what their age are and then what you're doing to them. I don't know what's going on with this this methods but what's happening in this experiment but okay let's move on to the results. After you finish the methods you're going to write the results. I'm gonna switch again. Okay so the results tell you what you found. So you're going to present the findings in the same order as I mentioned methods results method analysis one results of the analysis one. Methods of analysis two is the second set of results from that analysis. You're going to present the data in figures and tables and as text. So your result is your figures and tables and it's also the text. The text is the figures and tables it's just explained in sentences. You're going to report on data collection and participants and report data relevant to your research question. So if you have many many many results you just choose the most important the most relevant to your research questions. We'll skip through these you can read them later just because we have a very we have a lot to do. So the organization of your results as I have mentioned several times same order as methods and answer the research question as presented in the figures. So for example your research question that you said in the introduction was how do hospital patients over age 55 feel about post-operative care. In the data or the way you'll present this based on the data might look like this. Hospital patients over the age of 55 were 30% more likely to report negative experiences with post-operative care. Okay this is what your general methods oh sorry your general results might look like one of your results. Then you can elaborate with secondary results so after you write your main result you put the details. Same with the methods you have the main method and then the the details. So the common negative issues reported were in attention by nurses etc and then here you can cite your figures and tables as well. So let's talk about writing captions very quickly. Captions are not sentences they're almost always phrases starting with a noun your main keyword and then what your figure or table is measuring. So if the survey question is let's say you you ask some participants what do hospital patients over the age of 55 think about post-operative care and this is the the data you come up with probably doesn't really look like it makes sense but for the sake of the picture. Attitudes towards post-operative care of patients over 55 that's how you can write your caption and when you write your text you might you're going to write as a full sentence obviously. So you're going to write the captions first before you write the results section. Let's look at our example again so you can see they start with this Maldi TOF MS analysis. That was the first method of analysis brought up in the method section right remember? So this author addresses the research question with details about the data. The Maldi TOF MS spectra of kimchi fermented for one two or three weeks were obtained in the mass range of 2,000 20,000 MZ in total 80 spectra were recorded in triplicate. So here's the data that they came up with and the second research question is how will Maldi TOF MS approach what will the approach yield in terms in determining fermentation differences? So this is what this is answering that question. Here's the secondary details however the mass range of actual acquired mass spectra was set to 2,000 to 10,000 MZ. Mass peaks greater than 10,000 were not detected in kimchi samples. Okay so you've got details about this analysis and your caption presents data as a statement right here's your the caption PCA of mass spectra of Korean and kimchi Chinese kimchi during mass fermentation. This is the text for this figure. I know this is gets really dry looking at every detail of these let's just look at what it's what this author is doing okay. Again this is the subheading discrimination of kimchi by fermentation time based on geographical origin using PCA. Well that was our first method of analysis right PCA. So this addresses a second research question which is how are the kimchi samples differentiated using PCA. They discuss how they examine these correlations. They were expressed using three-dimensional scatter plots. So here's the scatter plots and then figure one shows the sample score plots and actually they list more details in their paper which I did not put here but you can see they start with discussing how they they analyzed the data what they came up with and then the details more details about the this data and they also say figure one shows the sample. So they're referring they're having a sort of dialogue with the figure they're saying if you want to see the details of this look at figure one figure one shows XYZ so there's a lot of discussing discussion about what is being shown in these figures. Okay here's the third paragraph remember it's one paragraph just this is the heading discrimination of kimchi by fermentation phase based on origin using HCA. HCA was the second method of analysis if you remember and another research question is addressed how were the kimchi samples differentiated using HCA. These research question you should have in your mind before you write the paper so you can answer it in your results. And here the this is not a comparison of it's not a discussion about the about the results just comparing basic the basic results so you're not discussing the meaning of the results and just basically comparing them. So in contrast Korean kimchi sample D is not clearly associated with any of the Korean or Chinese kimchi samples. So yeah so you're coming you're showing how the samples differed but you'll see how later on in discussion section you're going to discuss what that means and the larger find the larger importance of the findings. But be careful not to include discussion in the results. Okay so let's talk about some data guidelines for results this is just a few there's many things you want to keep in mind but generally. Indicate statistical tests used with all relevant parameters. So use standard deep mean and standard deviation. Be specific. Median and interpercentile range. Be specific. Use quantitative details. Use mean and standard deviation to report normally distributed data. Use median and interpercentile range to report skewed data. You could probably find these results guidelines and parameters in the journal and for editors or I'm sorry the for authors section you can often find you know how they want you to report these. For numbers use two significant digits you know don't write it don't write two point zero seven eight five six four four four unless you're dealing with I don't nano nano measurements. Never use percentages for very small samples. Okay use one out of two instead of 50%. These are basic rules that if you read the for authors section you can get an idea of how to what to do in this section. Okay quiz three what should the results section include? A background information about your study. B statements about data figures and tables. C a concise hypothesis or problem statement. D data from related research sources. Yes sir. B it should include statements about data figures and tables. You guys are five for five. Better than the other schools so far. Should I tell you the other schools that we've done this at? Maybe later. Right your data in the figures and tables are the results written as sentences in the order so the reader understands. That's all that's all it is. Okay you only get one question for results. The fourth step which is the fourth section is the discussion section. So you're gonna say here what the results mean. What is the point of these results? This is the easiest section to write but it's the hardest section to get right. Does that make sense? Many many authors can just write as much as possible and you can be a little bit looser in this section but what you want to do is sell your study. Why is your study important? Why do people want to read it? Why what are the implications of your work? Okay so you want to sell your data you know like you're a salesman saleswoman when you're when you're discussing these. Criticize and justify your studies methods. Suggest improvements for how other studies could be better done to get to get more information about this topic. Answer the question did your study contribute to knowledge in the field or not? Does your study help fill in the gap or did it fail? You need to be honest too. You can't you don't want to say in my study this was the most groundbreaking study about pizza ever done. It's gonna change the face of food and pizza. Well you probably want to be specific about the kind of pizza that you're changing and how. Discuss the impact of the research on other top other areas if it's if it applies. Okay let's let's keep going here. Here's some tips for a discussion. So first focus on what is most important then move to least important. Good rule. Start with an analysis of your results and then move to implications. We'll show you the structure next. So you're gonna talk of a summary of the results. Why is it important? What can be done to make it better? Divide the analysis by paragraph. This goes with organization and clarity the writing factor. Don't smoosh everything together because the discussion section is very long. So you don't want to just write one paragraph. You need to make sure each paragraph is has a separate idea. We'll skip the grammar stuff. Okay you can read the rest later because there's a lot of details but I want to look at the structure and what the author has done to to put the correct structure here. Okay in this discussion they have not used any headings for some reason. There's no headings but they've still organized each paragraph, each one paragraph by topic. So they start by summarizing the process, the results, and overall purpose. So in this study Maldi TOF MS was utilized to discriminate between Chinese and Korean kimchi of different geological words. So you'll see this sentence in your introduction too. The discussion and the introduction have a lot in common. The discussion just has a lot more about what the results mean and why they're important. But this start off by you know why is your study important and what did it yield. So they write to the best of our knowledge a mass fingerprinting approach using Maldi TOF has not been performed to analyze kimchi samples. You're comparing your study to other studies. Why is your study better? Why is it unique? And they do this again. The mass spectra of kimchi samples obtained were analyzed using PCA, HC, and heat maps. This is interesting. PCA which is a multivariable analysis method has been applied for the discrimination of coffee, cocoa, wine, saffron, and honey. So you have all these other citations about how it can be used in other similar fermentation studies, other foods, other methods of discrimination. So well your study could be important for a lot of foods and this method has been used a lot of times so it's a good reliable method. The author also offers a critique of the study. In this case it's more of a justification. So because kimchi is a fermented food, to discriminate between Chinese and Korean kimchi based on origin, samples must be prepared at various formation times. So they're they're giving reasons why they use these times, why they used 10 minutes, and why they use this method. Okay we'll just move quickly through here. Another result is PCA scatter plots and explain the significance between of these results to the research. The result implied, keywords, we have keywords in blue by the way, useful verbs, the result implied that various polymers such as proteins or polysaccharides disappeared or appeared with the amount affected by fermentation process. Why don't we put this in the results? Because it's a more general observation, it's a more general relationship, it's not an exact finding of the experiment of the of the methods. Also you're going to assess which results were most useful. So which of the results used were most useful? This one says that the principles component scatterplot of the kimchi samples after four weeks of formation showed the best discrimination between Chinese group and Korean group as compared with the scatterplots for 1, 2, and 3. So this scatterplot was the most useful and you can go back to the results and see what that what that showed. Okay and this is the last page. They focus on the success of these methods. So HCA was found to discriminate successfully, right? That's the the main finding and a main importance of this study. Based on these results all the kimchi samples clearly successfully clustered into Chinese and Korean groups. So you're discussing how this was this the results worked in this case and you're comparing again this study to related research. The degradation of polymers with the progress of fermentation has been reported for sourdough and other fermented unsalted soybean paste. Therefore it can be used for other research and furthermore therefore constructing a database of mass spectra so if if another researcher constructs a database that contains the mass spectra and the geographical information this will allow the kimchi samples to be identified within 10 minutes. So if you do this this other kind of work you might be able to yield even better results is what they're saying. And in the conclusion they really point out why that's important. So in the conclusion, the conclusion is the same as the discussion, right? It's just the kind of the final paragraph, the 느낌표. Why is the study you know such so good? So you're going to indicate extensions and further implications you'll see here. So this author focuses on the success of the study to differentiate kimchi samples. Again Korean kimchi samples were employed for HCA which allowed clear differentiation between Chinese and Korean kimchi groups within 10 minutes. So they state clearly this worked HCA worked to differentiate the samples. And finally at the very last sentence they say our method could be applied to discriminate the origin of other fermented salted vegetables at reduced cost in shorter times. I think this the very end of this sentence is a good example of you know telling researchers why this study is awesome, why it rocks. Because it has a lot of other potential and it could actually affect the economics. It could allow researchers to find bacteria in certain kimchi, certain cabbage in different locations quicker and cheaper. All right it's our discussion quiz which is not a purpose of the discussion section. A. To explain the results of your study. B. To critique and justify your methods. C. To discuss implications and suggest further research or D. To describe how you prepared the materials. Yes. Which one? D. D again which is not a purpose of discussion. To describe how you prepared the materials. Bingo. Where do you describe how you prepared the materials? Sir? Which section do you? The methods. Yeah. All right so don't forget to grab your coupon at the end. Okay this is the last section and then we're going to discuss the introduction. We will discuss some grammar issues quickly and then we'll have a break so hang with me. Okay so in the last thing you'll do is write the introduction. The introduction tells the readers right away what does the study do, why is it important. And many researchers will tell you in journal journals will tell you introduction is most the most important part as far as getting other researchers interested. Because if they read the introduction and it's great then they're hooked. And that goes with abstract too. Abstract it's very very very important. Okay so in this section you should establish the context of the research. Include gaps in knowledge that your study is going to fill. State the purpose of the work. Give a hypothesis and or research question. And discuss why your approach, why you chose this approach. And include the main content found in the results and discussion. But you're not including the data you're just kind of some you're previewing previewing this results. Okay so here's some questions. What's the problem being solved? What do we know about the problem? Are there existing solutions? What what have other researchers showed that we can solve this problem? What are the limitations to these solutions? What's the problem with the current understanding? And your hypothesis what do you want to do with this study? So let's break it down the introduction down to two main questions. First what is the gap in knowledge that exists? And why does it need filling? Okay this is gonna show you the importance why should people care about your study? And two how does this study fill that gap? This is the role of the study or the hypothesis really. What's the problem? How does your study solve that problem? So for the introduction has many parts. I'd say it's the most complicated of of your paper and that's maybe why you should write it last so you don't miss anything. So start with the background information about the topic and this means you're going to talk about the problem. Next talk about the motivations. Why did you do the study? What are the key primary literature that you used that you can cite that supports your work? What's your hypothesis or your research question? And what approaches did you use and why? Okay this is your organization and almost all introductions will be organized like this. So let's look at our chart again. We have this upside-down pyramid shape. We start with what is known, our understanding of the world. What is unknown and how do we fill it, our hypothesis. We'll just look at a few of these. So you want to make sure only use highly relevant sources. Only use the sources that are closely related to your study, right? Don't use, you know, Einstein if you're not writing about his exact, you know, theories of relativity or related theories. Use keywords from your title. So in your introduction, use words from your paper title right away and include a clear hypothesis, of course. Okay we'll continue. Okay so let's, we're gonna look at a different paper. This is not the kimchi paper. This is a different paper and the title is Targeted Therapy Database, a model to match patients molecular profile with current knowledge. So look at the keywords. Some keywords that they've used in the abstract. Targeted therapy, early diagnosis, molecular profile, cancer biology. So right away in the first paragraph, they have used a lot of keywords. Cancer, early diagnosis, anti-cancer treatments, molecular target therapies. They've also provided information that explains why it's important. So they start off very broad, right? Cancer represents the third leading cause of death worldwide. Wow that's really broad and it also shows why this study is important. Then it moves to a little bit narrower. Early diagnosis continues to offer the best chance for most tumors. Okay then it goes even more narrow. The efficacy of anti-cancer treatments. And it also shows why, what the problem is. They're not satisfactory. And then finally you have the most focused, the most focused, general agreement exists regarding the urgency of developing molecularly targeted therapies. So your paper is about, about this. Molecularly targeted therapies. Next you're going to discuss the, the literature. So summarize what researchers knew. Define key terms. Okay you, this is very important, defining the terms. When I read a lot of researchers essays, they don't define the terms. They just write you know, STW. And I'm like, I don't know what STW means. They, they don't say where, what it means. In the introduction you can define it. You know, write the term and explain what does it mean. If it is context-specific, if it's very basic, then don't have to define it. Okay, give a general review of the primary research literature. Again, not too many details, just general. Okay, so we have, continuing in the introduction, this is still the introduction of the same paper. The author defines the term targeted therapy. The term targeted therapy includes all those approaches that aim or tailor the therapy to the patient. And then they have citations. Right, this is a general explanation. They haven't discussed every single study. It takes too much space. They next use primary research to explain the current understanding. Research on anti-cancer treatment has made several advances. So there's a lot of studies that have been done to show how the smart approaches have, have increased treatment of certain types of cancer. Okay, we'll skip this. The basic thing is primary literature should be closely related to your study. And sources, you want to use as many as you can, but for a 10 to 15 page paper, it may be 5 to 10 sources. You also need to cite all of your sources that you list in the references. So if you have, if you listed a bunch of sources at the end, you have to use all of them in your paper. They're not just sources that you read and were interested in, or they're related. You have to use them in the paper. Okay, next you're going to state your statement of purpose. And this is a matter of using signal phrases. And in our workshop, we're going to discuss more about signal phrases. And actually, these are all signal phrases. Signal phrases tell the reader what you're going to do, what this section is exactly about. So use a clear form phrase to introduce your purpose. The purpose of this study was to, blah, blah, blah. The purpose of this study was to analyze XYZ. The objective of this study is to assess the importance of blah, blah, blah. So you have this, the purpose, the objective. What did you do? We investigated two possible mechanisms to explain the blah, blah. Okay, so this kind of phrases are very basic, but they tell the reader where your hypothesis is. It should be easy to see where your hypothesis is. Now here's some key verbs. Describes, investigates, lays out, presents, etc. So find the right verb. There's not that many of them. Find the one that works for your study. And where it's located is usually placed near the end of the introduction, usually as the topic sentence of the final paragraph. So the last paragraph of introduction, the first sentence. I'll skip this. Okay, let's see an example then. So this is an example of our same essay, the cancer treatment. The objective of this present project is, right, it's very clear what this author is, where their hypothesis is. The objective of the present project is to create a manually annotated database. And it's one sentence, but it can be quite long. It's quite a long sentence, but you want to put all of the things you're doing in that short sentence, one or two sentences. Last, you may or may not use an approach rationale. Rationale is a justification of why you did this study a certain way, a justification of your study design. So this usually follows the purpose statement, right? Right after your hypothesis, purpose statement, you might explain why you did this. So you might address why you chose this kind of approach. What are the advantages of this particular system, this model? Why is this technique better than the other studies that you mentioned? Could look like this. If your hypothesis, this is your hypothesis, given the described protective role of caffeine, blah blah blah, your rationale might be, since the role of non-nuclear p27 in cells was never examined in detail, right, this is the signal phrase too, right, since this these studies never did this, we're missing, we're missing this, the way, this method of study here. We investigated whether p27 is present in the mitochondria, okay? So since nobody did this, this is why we designed our study like this. And because it would help present a new mode of action for caffeine, explaining its protective function in the cardiovascular system. So you've effectively said to your reader, oh, this is why we're approaching this way. These authors did, they approached from the cell wall. We're approaching the mitochondria. Maybe it's a bad example. Okay, explain the advantage of your approach. All right, so there's some mistakes that many authors make in the introduction. Citing basic scientific knowledge, that's really annoying as a reader. When, I'm, I'm a generalist reader, right? I'm not a biologist, I'm not a chemist, but when I read basic, a study that's not related to it, it's, if the study is about turtles and you cite research about birds that's not related, but it's like, oh, both turtles and birds are cold-blooded animals. I mean, it's not important. So you don't, you're not going to get points for putting that, that kind of literature into your introduction. It's not relevant. Don't forget to include citations. If you don't cite, you are plagiarizing and that's very bad. Don't forget to define your terms. You have to define your terms in the introduction and don't discuss your methods and results, right? Don't discuss them in detail. Bring them up, but don't, don't go into great detail. All right, this is the final quiz before our grammar section. When should you write the introduction section? A. First, before the methods. B. Last, after the discussion and before the abstract. C. Third, after the results and before the discussion. Or D. Second, after the methods. Okay, you've done one. I'm gonna get someone who hasn't done it. Thank you. How about you? Yeah. B. Last, after the discussion, before the abstract. That's right. Wow. You guys have got every single one right. I don't want to be, I feel bad if the next person doesn't get it right. But you write, you write the introduction last to make sure you captured everything that was in your paper and you're not leaving anything out. Actually, you write the abstract last, but of these sections, you write the introduction last. Okay, which section usually only uses the past tense and passive voice? We, we talked about one section in particular. Methods, results, discussion, or introduction? Yes. Methods. Good. Usually, I say usually, it's not a rule. Don't leave and say, God, that guy said we only use passive voice. And then you read an article, there's active voice all over. This stands out because the other sections generally do not use the passive voice. So, this methods, you'll see it, it's used more often. Okay, so let's talk now about improving some writing errors. Some of you, if you're a native English speaker, or if you're quite good at English, you might be sort of annoyed by some of these. But we want to show you some of the biggest mistakes in grammar and, yeah, grammar issues that writers make. So, the biggest one, you might guess, is a determiner misuse. A and the, this, that, these, those. So, let's just first talk about articles. The first thing we're going to talk about is article use. Article is just A, N, and DA. And I'm going to give you a little quiz altogether, too. So, if you know it, you can sleep through this one. Okay, so here's some rules for articles. We have uncountable, for uncountable nouns, these are nouns that cannot be counted, right? You don't use, like, water. One water, two waters, three waters. Just, water is not countable. So, if you have any of the countable noun, use the noun with no article. For example, drinking water has many benefits. Love is a strong emotion, right? You don't have any article. If your uncountable noun is one specific noun, use the. So, if you're referring to specific water, the water, that water, right? This water. We examined the water bordering the town. Which water? The water bordering the town. And remember to use the in the structure, the noun plus preposition. So, the heart of the city, the extent of the damage. So, you can kind of use this tool to decide whether or not to use an article. Or, of course, your editor will fix it for you. But we see these a lot. And if you turn it into a journal and you have these issues, the editor might question, the journal editor might question your research, which you don't want. Okay, for uncountable nouns, I'm sorry, for countable nouns, if that noun is one member of the countable noun, use a or an with the noun. I want a car. A virus could have infected this specimen. A virus, right? Not that virus, but any virus, any one of this viruses. All members of the noun use the noun with no articles, right? Colors can affect our emotions. Scientists have been researching this issue. And use a plural form, too, right? Students are often hungry during class. The countable noun as a whole group used the. The harp is a difficult instrument. So, the harp is a countable. You can count one harps, two harps. The harp, the car, sorry, the car is a difficult thing to fix. The elephant is a large animal. Okay, so use this as a tool if you need. So, let's do a quick quiz. Which article should you use? We have a, an, the, or no article. How about number one? You can just shout it out, anybody. We analyzed a variety of tissue samples. Two, experts identified lake surrounding the compound. The lake. As the source of the infection. Why, why is we use the in this case? Yeah, good. And a specific lake. If we just said like as the source of all, there is no in question, just the source of infections, then there would be, we would not need the specific. And three, colors affect our perception of reality. Oh, you guys are smart. Okay, okay. The next one's a bit more complicated. I like this one because this is more about style, not grammar. So, a nominalization. A nominalization is basically you have taken a noun, or you have a meaningless verb, and then you have a noun that's been changed to a noun from a verb. So, you have extra words and it's kind of like not, not academic, not academic writing. So, you want to delete the meaningless verb and convert the nominalization to a main verb. So, let's look at this. Instead of Joe will conduct research on the impact, blah, blah, blah, Joe will research the recent droughts impact on local wildlife. It's much shorter. In the verb, you have one verb, research. Conduct research, you have a nominalization, which is research. Here, research is a noun. So, actually, we see this all the time in science writing because science writers like to copy the form, which is okay, but I think if this is much clearer and more direct, if you see many, many, many nominalizations, it can get a bit annoying. Why do you conduct research? You're researching. Okay, the board will make a decision next week about whether to accept your, accept you. The board will decide next week whether to accept you. We don't need to make a decision, we can just decide. The approval of the plan was given by the committee. The committee approved the plan. Okay, their interpretation of the implementation of the Institute's program was insightful. Instead, they insightfully interpreted how the Institute implemented its program. Oh, both of these give me a headache, but second one is much cooler. First was their introduction of the analysis of dreams by the trauma patients. This kind of thing, we see all the time, like constantly as editors. So, if you can, try to change it by yourself. First, they introduced how they analyzed the trauma patients' dreams. When you are revising your paper is the time you can change these. When you're writing it, don't worry about it, but when you go back over it, look for, see if you have any meaningless verb like conduct or make and see if you can change to a stronger verb. So, let's try to do these together. They reached the conclusion that we should run a new cohort study. What's a better way to write this? Nice. They concluded that we should run a cohort study. The undertaking of building the new company was complicated by their lack of experience. It's a bit, it's tough. I don't know who, who wrote this in the beginning. They lacked experience, which complicated how they built the new company. So, we split it into two clauses. Or, we can say they're inexperienced, complicated how they built the new company. I like the second one better because complicated is doing more work in the middle. They're inexperienced, complicated, the predicate. Okay, and last we'll just review past and present tense. When to use either. We got about a minute before break and then we'll, we'll give you 10 minutes. Okay, so generally past tense is used in prior research or during the results or observations made in your study. For prior research, Watson asserted that mice in group B developed. So, these are the actual things you see in the study. Use the present tense with general facts, right? Grass is green, the earth revolves around the sun, the sky is blue. Or, when it's the subject of the sentence of your paper. Our study demonstrates. When you're talking about your study, how it fits in with the science, you don't use past. So, you don't say our study, our study has demonstrated that grass is green. Our study demonstrates that grass is green. Our, the results showed, you can use results as a past, past tense. Conclusion or interpretation of current findings. So, entropy may be involved in, may be involved. So, let's see some more examples. So, use past tense when referring to prior research. The Boeing Group hypothesized that there would be an increase. This actually depends on if you're using APA or, or other, I believe AMA and APA, you will use past tense. MLA, you, you will use present tense when discussing other, other works. Many studies have done throughout the 20th, should be 20th century, have confirmed this affinity between carbon and nitrogen, right? Studies have confirmed. Observations. Tumor cells, metastasize upon, upon exposure to this chemical. I think we need to edit this, which is ironic. Okay, present tense. Okay, air pressure decreases with altitude. The average human skeleton contains 20, 270 bones. And last, if the subject of the sentence is your work. This study confirms previous findings. Our research indicates this is probably the hardest rule to keep in mind, to remember when you're writing, but you can use these, these guidelines and other ones on the internet to sort of check your work before you give it to an editor. It's gonna help, help a lot in case the editor misses something or just so you understand what you've written, the quality of your writing. Okay, our last one, sorry. Comorbidity appears to be a factor. The results of past studies are corroborated by this evidence, evidence. Okay, present tense with the interpretation. All right, so that's the end of the first section. If you have any questions you can ask now, but just know during the workshop we will sort of be doing a similar, we'll be analyzing another research paper, but making some changes and then doing some activities, but you can ask any questions now.