How to write an academic paper, according to me

Excellent advice, both in the post and in the comments. I only wanted to add that at least some readers (that I guess belong somewhere in between the skimmer and full reader categories) read the figure captions (and look at the figures, obviously) besides reading introduction and/or conclusions, as a way to see directly, but rapidly, the main results of the paper and how they are demonstrated. This obviously depends on the field, and I can only know for sure that it happens in my own field(s), stochastic processes/modelling of biological processes/other related fields.

I personally also do it for biology papers, because I do not trust the conclusions, but I'm not sure biologists do this.

The standard formula you are typically taught in science is IMRaD: Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion. This of course mainly works for papers that are experimental, but I have always found it a useful zeroth iteration for structure when writing reviews and more philosophical papers: (1) explain what it is about, why it is important, and what others have done. (2) explain how the problem is or can be studied/solved. (3) explain what this tells us. (4) explain what this new knowledge means in the large, the limitations of what we have done and learned, as well as where we ought to go next.

Experienced academics also scan the reference section to see who is cited. This is a surface level analysis of whether the author has done their homework, and where in the literature the paper is situated. It is a crude trick, but fairly effective in saving time. It also leads to a whole host of biases, of course.

Different disciplines work in different ways. In medicine everybody loves to overcite ("The brain [1] is an organ commonly found in the head [2,3], believed to be important for cognition [4-18,23].") Computer science is lighter on citations and more forgiving of self-cites (the typical paper cites Babbage/Turing, a competing algorithm, and two tech reports and a conference poster by the author about the earlier version of the algorithm). Philosophy tends to either be very low on citations (when dealing with ideas), or have nitpicky page and paragraph citations (when dealing with what someone really argued).

Lawyers write memos to other lawyers and the clients to tell them the answer to questions. The most common format is:

• Question presented -- one sentence, maybe two

• Short answer -- Ideally yes or no, but usually a couple sentences.

• Facts -- A description of all of the background behind the question

• Analysis or discussion -- The reasoning to get from the question, contextualized by the facts, to the answer

• Conclusion -- A plea for more billable hours. Ahem. I mean a statement of your level of certainty with respect to your answer, and avenues of research that would lend more certainty.

I've heard of this format as being called IRAC -- issue, rule, analysis, conclusion (where the facts get thrown into the analysis).

Within the analysis, there are many ways of organizing the material, many of which I think are partially redundant of the format of the memo. Here's an example: http://www.law.cuny.edu/legal-writing/students/memorandum/memorandum-1.html.

Max L.

Reminds me of How to Get a Paper Accepted at OOPSLA by Kent Beck

Excerpt:

One startling sentence. [You] need to find the one thing you want to say that will catch their interest. [...] Find the most interesting thing you have done and write it down, [...] You want the reader's eyes to open wide when they realize what it is you've just said. I think some people are reluctant to boil their message down to one startling sentence because it opens them up to concrete criticism. [...] You can be proven wrong. Wait! You spent five years proving it was easy. Make your case.

Divide your paper into four sections. The first describes the problem to be solved. When the [comittee] member is done reading it, they should understand why it is a problem, and believe that it is important to solve. The second section describes your problem. You are convincing the [comittee] member that your solution really could solve the problem. This section is sometimes supplemented with a section between the defence and related work which describes implementation details. The third section is your defence of why your solution really solves the problem. The [comittee] member reading it should be convinced that the problem is actually solved, and that you have thought of all reasonable counter arguments. The final section describes what other people have done in the area. Upon reading this section, the [comittee] member should be convinced that what you have done is novel.

I try to have four sentences in my abstract. The first states the problem. The second states why the problem is a problem. The third is my startling sentence. The fourth states the implication of my startling sentence.

I notice that some commenters are presenting the sections "Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion" as the general structure of an academic paper. This is indeed the structure I have encountered most often, and it is a very good structure for academic writing, but whenever I find a paper with this exact structure I wonder "Where is the conclusion?". As Stuart mentions most academics read the title, abstract and then quit, but in papers with no Conclusion section I can't help but sympathise with the readers for this behaviour! After reading the abstract the reader might want a bit more clarity and information about the exact claims made by the authors of the paper, and if it turns out that you have to work your way through the whole Discussion section or the raw data of the Results section just to get more clarity than that one line in the abstract then I consider that to be a good moment to stop reading the paper. As far as I know it's not common practice to have a separate section summarising the interpreted results, but I personally enjoy reading papers with a Conclusions section far more than those without. Why not make life easy for the mildly-interested reader?

I think this viewpoint is correct for reviewers, but not necessarily citers.

As a citer, my attention is distributed in this order: Abstract, Figures, Result & Methods, THEN Introduction & Conclusions & Discusion. In my view, everything other than "this is what i found when I did this" is extra information.

I don't care nearly as much why you went doing that, nor do I care what you think the results mean, unless I'm actually stumped for explanations. Typically that sort of information is either implicit or in the abstract anyway.

I think this is because reviewers want to know what point you are making, where as people looking to cite stuff are typically trying to support a point rather than understand a point.

The title may be a little more important than you think, minor tipbit from a friend who works for a company analysing citations and public interest in science. (so no good citation to back this up)

A question mark "?" in the title correlates with approx ~10% lower mentions on twitter and slightly lower citations, a colon ":" approx 10% more.

The least important audience. An interesting title may draw casual browsers in, but those likely aren't very valuable readers. Most people encountering an academic article will either be looking for it, or will have had it referred to them from some source.

I'm not sure whether that's true. Quite often when doing literature searches I end up with more papers than I have time to read. Going through the citation list of a paper often gives you quickly more papers than you can look at.

When reading social science/economics papers I always makes sure to understand the details of the method used and the exact definitions the authors are using. Also important to check is the magnitude of any affect found and the sample size (though this should be in the abstract). I have found that too many times the abstracts are extremely misleading. The author's choice of metrics matters. And many common words have no obvious precise definition (examples: "inequality" "economic growth"). In many cases I still skip alot the paper but after seeing so many social science authors use extremely misleading defintions/methods I am afraid of spreading misniformation to myself or others.

I personally wish authors made it super easy to find exactly what they did and made the exact defintiions they are using instantly visible. So I would recomend people do this in their own writing. This ordering:

Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion )

Is great if the methods and results sections are clearly labeled and well written. But sadlt many papers do not follow this model very closely :(

This is excellent. I've had some vague ideas along these lines, but nothing this comprehensive and precise. Very helpful.

In a sense, the paper consists of three parts - title, abstract, and text - whereas there are five types of readers, according to your classificatory schema (though how to delineate these types of course is a bit arbitrary). One question is whether one should have even more layers, to clarify exactly what a skimmer and full reader should read. (This does exist to some extent - e.g. footnotes and appendices presumably are not for skimmers - but one could develop this further.) For instance, each section of the text could start off with a "mini-abstract" which the skimmers could focus on.

I get the sense that today's article formats are intended to satisfy deep readers (aside from the title and abstract readers) and that more could be done to help, e.g., skimmers. This is just a hunch, though, and I'd be interested in hearing whether people agree with this.

I would agree. I think a strong Title and Abstract are important for research purposes. I was able to do more effective research in grad school with those things and I worked to make my papers the same way. In this age of search engine indexing your paper is more likely to be found if those things are strong. I think picking good keywords for those as well is a good idea so the work gets read.

When I skim an empirical paper (typically in psychology), I look at the abstract, then the figures (graphs & tables) to see the study design & results, then the methods section to see what the researchers actually did, and maybe also the results section to clear up lingering questions.

All of the main results of the paper should appear in a graph, table, which should be able to clearly convey the experimental design, the pattern of results (including effect sizes & statistical significance), and the sort of statistical analysis that was done. The figures are basically a souped up version of the abstract, which should be able to basically stand on their own to convey the study (or at least when supported by the abstract and their captions).

The methods section should make it possible to replace all of the abstract labels with concrete descriptions, e.g. "people who had this sentence included in their instructions agreed more with these statements." (Sometimes the good stuff is in an appendix.) I want to be able to picture what the study involved from the point of view of the research subjects. This helps a lot with assessing the plausibility of the results, seeing possible alternative explanations, and with getting a sense of how much to generalize from these studies.

The results section is the place to look to get more details on analyses that were too complicated to be clearly conveyed in the figures and to check on whether their statistical analyses are kosher. How exactly did they get those "composite scores" that they have in the table? Do the results still hold if they control for this variable? Did they run this additional analysis which could help rule out that alternative explanation? Etc. (Sometimes the good stuff is in a footnote.)