The postgraduate students are often assigned with many types of academic writing, such as writing on research projects, reports, theses or dissertations, as well as scientific papers for publication. These types of academic writing may differ from the subject and scope of the projects, but all types of writing based on the research have similar procedures. The essential processes of writing a research paper include: finding a topic, collecting information, drafting the components of the paper, and preparing the final copy (Slade 2)[1]. This chapter, therefore, aims to help the postgraduate students to improve their research papers through learning the principles and skills in writing papers. The discussion in this chapter starts with choosing topics for research papers, followed by writing the basic components of research papers.

 

Here, we should mention that, within a chapter of a book, it is impossible to discuss all detailed guides to writing on those kinds of academic papers. Our discussion will focus on journal articles. Specifically, we will introduce the basic principles that are widely accepted by the scientific and academic communities for writing journal articles in English. This discussion will be organized by the normal acceptable structure and components of the average paper. These components are: Title, Introduction (Why did you start?), Materials and Methods (What did you do?), Results (What did you find?), Discussion (What does it mean?), Acknowledgements, References, and Summary (Lindsay 5) [2].  This chapter,  therefore, briefly guide you through choosing a topic, writing the title page, introduction, methods, results, discussion and conclusion, as well as acknowledgement at the end of a scientific paper.

 

（本文作者：中国农业大学 王志芳）

 

 

 

 

[1] Slade, Carole. Form and Style: Research Papers, Reports and Theses, 10ed. Mifflin Company, 2007.

 

[2] Lindsay, David. A Guide to Scientific Writing, 2ed. Melbourn: Longman, 1995.