Canvas Foreword
The following content is a discursive “canvassing” exercise intended to: process ideas and prime them for more formal publication; foreground thought processes in the spirit of auto-discourse (see A Primer on Auto-Discourse); garner feedback from peers; establish conceptual provenance for ideonomic archiving purposes.
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I’m currently reading Writing a Scientific Article by F. Ecarnot et al, and it strikes me as a good opportunity to write some notes, in the interest of actively engaging with the topic, and in the interest of exploring some potential methods of public notetaking to inform a more standardized practice.
So far, seeing as I don’t believe I am at liberty to reproduce the content of this article in my own knowledge base, as a markdown file, I will instead create only a router note for it (i.e. Writing a Scientific Article), which redirects the reader to the source URL. Additionally, I will quote passages using the markdown blockquote notation, rather than the markdown transclusion notation.
Granted, I am not writing scientific articles, at least not in any conventional sense (see Survey on Methodology for Onchain Ecosystem Funding and Impact Assessment), so the relevance of this paper to my work is only partial. That said, I’m sure there are elements of the scientific research and communication methodology explored herein which will prove instructive for my purposes.
Tense
Lastly, a word about the tense to use in the introduction. For many researchers, English is not their native language, and this is an additional difficulty in the writing process that needs to be overcome. You should try to avail of any resources available to you to help you with the quality of your written English. Many large institutions have translators or scientific writers who may be able to translate or correct your text. For those who are not lucky enough to have such resources at their disposal, you should look to important publications in good quality journals for examples of the desired format. Pointers for the tense to use in the introduction are given in Table 2.
So far, with respect to my writings in this knowledge base, some have been intended for external communication, while others (such as this page) have been intended more for internal purposes of exploration and rumination. Jointly, they constitute an auto-discursive framework, whereby readers or agents more broadly may audit the intellect and intentions of the writer. Thus, there appears to be two categories of discourse, each warranting its own communicative strategy, of which one rhetorical aspect would be tense.
I have no clear plans as of yet for any unified application of tense, either for my external or internal writings, nor am I even yet convinced of the need for such a unified arrangement. The authors of this paper do effectively convey the importance of clear language, whether it be for the purposes of simplified eventual translation efforts or just for the purposes of general clarity. With respect to my external publications I definitely align with this need, i.e. to clearly and with minimal ambiguity convey the ideas at hand. Otherwise, all of these writings may as well be internal-facing.
Figures & Tables
A major question for many researchers when writing the results section is whether to describe the results in the text, or use a table or figure. While there are no strict rules for this, in general, results that can easily be described in one or two lines can be written in the text. Tables should be used for data such as baseline characteristics, outcomes, treatments, where the same variables are being described for two or more groups. Tables also generally contain the most important results, and on their own, should be sufficient to give the reader a clear idea of your findings. Figures are useful in cases where the source data is either too complex for presentation or not easily interpretable.
I like this attitude of communicative minimalism, in situations where the aim is to convey ideas as unambiguously and intuitively as possible, i.e. not to include a diagram where a few sentences will suffice.
Epistemic Context
In practical terms, you may indicate how your results are likely to influence practice, or the state of knowledge. For example, will your results sway the general opinion one way or the other? You may also indicate any potential avenues for future research, particularly new hypotheses that may have been generated by observations on your secondary objectives. Finally, a short paragraph outlining the strengths and limitations of your study is useful. In particular, enumerating your limitations has several advantages. Firstly, it allows the reviewers to see that you are aware of your own shortcomings, and secondly, it provides an opportunity for you to defend yourself on these points, and state why the supposed limitation may not be so negative after all.
Good to see this is epistemic/intentional foregrounding is a promoted convention in scientific publishing, as it is also important for auto-discourse. Of course, auto-discourse seems more introspective and philosophic than does scientific discourse, but it does make me wonder whether the scientific community would be better off if it was common practice to publish notes and other pre-publication ephemera, in the spirit of drafting in public.
Of course, having no experience in academia, I can’t tell for certain how permissible such an attitude would be, given certain socio-professional pressures to convey a sense of discursive certainly. That said, my suspicion here could be misplaced, and perhaps it would be an acceptable practice to publish supplementary literature wherein one foregrounds their aporia.
References
Many young researchers find it hard to judge when it is necessary to cite a reference. Basically, any idea or fact that emanates from another source (other than yourself) needs to be supported by a reference. However, universal truths or facts that are widely established do not need to be referenced (e.g. cardiovascular disease is very common, or cancer is a major cause of death). However, ideas, or more particularly phrases or names that were coined by someone else do need to be referenced (e.g. patients with the ‘‘McConnell Sign’’ – The paper by McConnell describing the sign should be cited here.
So far I have been defaulting to APA as a citation format, but its been a largely arbitrary decision so far, and I may end up switching. Also, seeing as I am writing in unpaginated markdown, I am generally opting for endnote citations rather that footnote citations.