Introductory Course on SCIENTIFIC WRITING

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Introductory Course on SCIENTIFIC WRITING

• Payman Jalali
• Department of Energy and Environmental Technology
• Lappeenranta University of Technology

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• Objectives
• The importance of technical and scientific
  writing
• How scientific publications are graded?
• Searching databases of scientific sources
• Primary steps and secrets in writing different
  parts of an article
• Abstract, Introduction, Methods Formulation,
  Results Discussions, Conclusions, References,
  Figures Tables
• How to write scientific and technical reports,
  theses and proposals?
• Introduction to sophisticated word processing
  tools
• Introduction to generating high-quality figures
  and demonstrations
• Judgement and critisizing articles, how to
  rebuttal?

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The importance of technical and scientific writing
Fundamentals of technical and scientific writing
is interesting to any graduate student,
researcher, scientist and whoever wishes to
publish results of months or years of research
and hard work. Readers will realize the
importance of your work only when you present it
in a proper way. Note that you may lose the real
value of your work with obvious mistakes or
inappropriate phrasing or presentation. For
example, you have some valuable data (such as
temperature variation of an object with time)
which you would like to reveal them to others.
The important question is how easy readers will
find the information to interpret? This is a
simple example, but it includes a very important
fact that we should always consider in technical
and scientific writing.
t (time)15, T (temperature)32º, t0,
T25º t6, T29º t3, T27º t12, T32º
t9, T31º time (min) temperature (ºC) 0
25 3 27 6 29 9 31 12 32 15 32
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How scientific publications are graded?

• Before starting to write an article we may think
  what journal can be the best place to publish our
  paper. Therefore, we need to know how a journal
  and its articles are graded.
• When an article is published it is important how
  many times it is cited by others within next
  coming years. So, a few parameters are defined to
  evaluate the importance of articles published in
  a journal.
• Impact Factor The journal impact factor is a
  measure of the frequency with which the "average
  article" in a journal has been cited in a
  particular year. The impact factor will help you
  evaluate a journal's relative importance,
  especially when you compare it to others in the
  same field.
• This is an example for calculating IF of a
  sample journal (from ISI site)

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How scientific publications are graded?
b) Immediacy Index This factor indicates how
immediately articles are cited. It is usually
measured for all articles published and cited in
a certain year. For example,
c) Journal Cited Half-Life Half of the citations
to the journal are to articles published within
the cited half-life.
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Searching databases of scientific sources
How can we get all such information about the
journals in addition to information of individual
articles, authors, keywords etc? Online
databases such as ISI Web of Knowledge provide
very useful information and tools for searching,
tracking citation and information on journals and
articles. What is ISI Web of Knowledge? ISI Web
of Knowledge, an integrated Web-based platform,
provides high-quality content and the tools to
access, analyze, and manage research information.
These tools include Cross-product searching
Links to full text Citation alerts Table of
contents alerts Personal journal lists Personal
bibliographic management
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Searching databases of scientific sources
The following link will lead you to the site of
ISI http//www.isiknowledge.com/
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Searching databases of scientific sources

• Searching tools about specific authors, articles
  etc.

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Searching databases of scientific sources
Pushing Search button leads us to the following
page. For instance, if we want to search
publications of an author, we write his/her last
name in Author section followed by the initial
letter(s) of his/her first and middle (if exists)
names. In order to make the search narrower we
can also add more information such as the address.
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Searching databases of scientific sources
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Searching databases of scientific sources
Pushing Cited Ref Search button leads us to the
following page. For instance, if we want to find
citations to a specific publication of an author,
we can give the information of the author, the
journal where article is published and the year
of publication.
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Searching databases of scientific sources
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Searching databases of scientific sources
References in, and times cited to the article
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Searching databases of scientific sources
Pushing Times Cited we can see the whole list
of articles that have referrred to the reference
article.
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REFERENCES
http//www.amstat.org/publications/jcgs/sci.pdf h
ttp//www.isiknowledge.com/ http//www.adelaide.e
du.au/library/guide/sci/Generalsci/sciwrit.html h
ttp//members.verizon.net/vze3fs8i/air/airpaper.h
tml http//pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/ci/31/
special/02sb_inet.html http//www.writing.eng.vt.
edu/