Research Papers

1. Story Line: Every paper tells a story. Know what your story is, stick to it, and tell it in order.

2. Outline: The ordered list of ideas that helps you to decide what to say where in your paper.

3. A "universal" outline: This outline is designed for general application in the atmospheric, oceanic, and related sciences.

4. TITLE: What message/insight are you focusing on?
5. ABSTRACT
• Topic: Here’s what we did
• Message:
  • Here’s why we did it
  • Here’s how we did it
  • Here’s how it works/what we learned
6. INTRO
   • Link to Audience Background: Build a bridge from what your readers already know to what you are going to tell them.
   • Review of Appropriate Literature: What do the readers need to know so they can understand what you did?
   • Summary of Material to be Covered
7. DATA
   • Data Needs: What data did you need and why did you need it?
   • Data Sources: Where did you get the data from?
   • Data Characteristics: Quality, density, resolution, etc.
8. PROCEDURES
   • Data Handling: What did you do to the data to remove errors, sort it, etc?
   • Theory: Where you started, what assumptions you made, and how you derived the theory
   • Modeling: Physics, numerics, configuration of the model and the runs you made with it.
   • Statistical Analysis Methods: Goals, methods, and justification.
9. RESULTS
   • Findings: What you discovered
   • Implications: What it means
   • Connections: What it has to do with previous results
10. CONCLUSIONS
    • Summary: Terse is good. Don't let this grow into a repeat of the abstract.
    • Conclusions: What new insights did you give us? Don't just repeat the results.
    • Future Work: What loose ends have you left?

This page was last updated by George Young on November 24, 2008