Essential Guide to Manuscript Writing for Academic Dummies: An Editor's Perspective

Abstract

Writing an effective manuscript is one of the pivotal steps in the successful closure of the research project, and getting it published in a peer-reviewed and indexed journal adds to the academic profile of a researcher. Writing and publishing a scientific paper is a tough task that researchers and academicians must endure in staying relevant in the field. Success in translating the benchworks into the scientific content, which is effectively communicated within the scientific field, is used in evaluating the researcher in the current academic world. Writing is a highly time-consuming and skill-oriented process that requires familiarity with the numerous publishing steps, formatting rules, and ethical guidelines currently in vogue in the publishing industry. In this review, we have attempted to include the essential information that novice authors in their early careers need to possess, to be able to write a decent first scientific manuscript ready for submission in the journal of choice. This review is unique in providing essential guidance in a simple point-wise manner in conjunction with easy-to-understand illustrations to familiarize novice researchers with the anatomy of a basic scientific manuscript.

Figure 1

Types of manuscripts based on complexity of content and context.

Figure 2

Generalized anatomy of manuscript based on IMRAD format.

Figure 3

Three important contents of the title page—title, abstract, and keywords.

Figure 4

Two major types of abstract—structured and unstructured. Structured abstracts are piecemealed into five different things, each consisting of one or two sentences, while unstructured abstracts consist of single paragraph written about the same things.

Figure 5

Three C concept followed while writing the manuscript.

Figure 6

Funnel-down scheme followed while writing the introduction section of manuscript, moving from broader to specific information.

Figure 7

Methods and the seven areas which it should exhaustively describe.

Figure 8

Interdependence between methods and results of the manuscript.

Figure 9

Pyramid scheme followed while writing the discussion section of manuscript, moving from the key results of the study to the specific conclusions.

Figure 10

Crux of the conclusion section.

Figure 11

A Google Scholar screenshot of different styles of formatting of references.

Figure 12

An overview of the journal's editorial process.