9  Writing and project development

It is a great feeling to close out one stage of a research project by writing in careful detail what we found, how we found it, and why it matters. But one of the most overwhelming challenges for me as a researcher, and I believe many others, is to write linear, logical, and likable research papers. One secret I’ve learned only recently is that the “writing” starts at the very beginning as one is developing a new project. This doesn’t mean that the ideas, motivations, and plan for research projects don’t change as the project goes from idea to finished product. But there must be sufficient justification and logic underlying a project’s motivation and implementation plan. For a while I’ve been familiar with the saying “great writing means great editing”, but until recently I didn’t understand that that means one must constantly be producing content (code or prose, figures, tables, etc.) and revising, reworking, recombining, and reevaluating our research products.

Good scientific writing contextualizes our research questions and goals by introducing existing problems and solutions in a linear, logical way. The methods, results, and analyses are presented in sufficient detail so the reader can re-produce the model and analysis. Scientific results themselves must be contextualized them in terms of our research questions and explains why the model outcomes emerged as they did. Good writing finishes with a review of the findings, the model or methods that produced them, the research questions that motivated the study, the impact of the findings for the research questions and more broadly for social behavior/sustainability, for social behavioral sciences, and even for our general understanding of the universe, as appropriate.

Scientific papers share a structure that we will use as a template so one need not start from scratch, called the IMAD (or IMRaD) structure. These acronyms stand for the major section headings of research papers corresponding to the major logical divisions of the content. IMAD stands for Introduction, Model, Analysis, and Discussion, and IMRaD stands for Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion.

More details on all this soon.