33 Scientific Writing

Section	Length (words)	Purpose	Verb Tense	Elements
Title	8 - 15
Abstract	200-250	Paper’s summary	Simple past (work done) Present (general fact, paper itself or analysis)	Objectives Methods Results Conclusions
Introduction	500-1000	Rationale for the paper	Present (current state-of-art, general background) Present perfect (previous research)	The problem
Literature Review	1000-2000	Understanding of the current knowledge landscape	Present (current state-of-art)	Review of the literature Hypothesis
Methods	500-1000	What was done	Simple past (work done) Present (explain diagrams/figures)	Approach/ methods used Data description Procedure description
Results	500-1500	presents data, facts	Simple past (what was found) present (explain diagrams/figures)	Results of analysis
Discussion	1000-1500	discuss relationships among constructs, and insights	Present (established knowledge) past (summarize findings)	Relationships Outliers Comparison to previous studies
Conclusions	500	summarize findings	Present (implications and future search) Past (completed research)

Rules of thumb:

Past: events that have been completed
- We found
- Method proposed by X was followed
Present Perfect: events that started in the past but are still ongoing
- Many studied have researched on
Present: events that are general fact, and current

Journal paper types: