Improving the writing of research papers: IMRAD and beyond

abstract, keywords, acknowledgments, and referenceshave become common parts of the IMRAD structure.Even the sequential order of the sections is altered insome journals (e.g., Nature places the methodssection, in smaller font size, at the end of a researchpaper).Since the early 1990s, structured abstracts—whichare organized into several sections with headings orsequential numbers—have become increasingly com-mon in scientiﬁc journals. A common format ofstructured abstracts is: Abstract [background, aims (orobjectives), methods, results, conclusions (or synthe-sis)]. Many leading journals in medical and physicalsciences now have them. Some ecology journals havealso jumped on this bandwagon, such as those ofBritish Ecological Society. Studies have shown thatstructured abstracts have several advantages for bothauthors and readers. For example, Hartley (2003)found that structured abstracts tend to be signiﬁcantlymore informative, more readable, and clearer thanunstructured, traditional abstracts. Hartley and Betts(2007) concluded that ‘‘… spatial organization,together with the greater amount of informationnormally provided in structured abstracts, explainswhy structured abstracts are generally judged to besuperior to traditional ones.’’ This should makeimmediate sense to landscape ecologists—isn’t thisanother example of pattern affecting process?A good abstract should be complete, concise, andclear. That is, an abstract should have all the compo-nents necessary for a short but complete story. Acondensed version of IMRAD, with greater emphasison results and discussion, is commonly assumed in anabstract. While being complete, an abstract must alsobe succinct because most journals require that it be nolonger than 250–300 words. In addition, a goodabstract must have a clear message—what’s the storyand so what? Assuming it is a solid study, the abstractshould not be difﬁcult to write after all sections of thepaper are completed. In reality, however, it is too easyto ﬁnd abstracts that are either empty in contents ordevoid of any recognizable organization. I think thatstructured abstracts can help improve upon theseproblems. The structured format guides the author totell a complete story in a nutshell, and facilitates afaster search for relevant information by either ahuman reader or a computerized search engine. Auseful message for authors is this: always write yourabstract following the logical order of structuredabstracts even if your target journal does not require astructured abstract.There are certainly other ways to improve theadaptive application of IMRAD. A number of expertsin linguistics and scientiﬁc writing have done a greatdeal of research on this subject. For example, Hartley(1999) proposed to go ‘‘from structured abstracts tostructured articles’’ with a more elaborated IMRADorganization. Sharp (2002) advised the application ofthe six W’s (what, why, when, how, where, and who)in each section of IMRAD as a way of providing morestructuring.More relevant to the readers of this journal,Gustafson (2011) made several thought-provokingsuggestions for improving scientiﬁc writing in land-scape ecology. The 7-section structure that he pro-posed may be considered a modiﬁcation to thetraditional IMRAD. The headings and subheadingsin the 7 sections can ﬁt into the IMRAD structure andprovide more organization in a way similar to Hartley(1999). As discussed earlier, structuring scientiﬁcwriting helps avoid missing important elements andfacilitates fast retrieval of information. As Riitters(2011) warned, however, too much structuring mayhinder the creative process of writing. In addition,because spatiotemporal patterns are central to mostlandscape ecological studies, graphical communica-tion and metadata documentation are critically impor-tant to scientiﬁc publishing in our ﬁeld. Henebry(2011) provided a brief but resourceful guide toimproving the quality of graphs (particularly maps)and ensuring valuable metadata to persist. I highlyrecommend writers to bear his advice in mind:‘‘Structure your story around the graphs and enablethe captions to capture the key points of your paper.’’Concluding remarksPeter Medawar, the British biologist and a NobelLaureate in Physiology/Medicine, famously said thatthe scientiﬁc paper is afraud ‘‘becauseit misrepresentsthe processes of thought that accompanied or gave riseto the work that is described in the paper’’ (Medawar1964). He argued that discussion in an IMRAD-structured paper should be placed at the beginning,which then is followed by results and methods.Meadows (1985) disagreed, and argued that thescientiﬁc paper is an archaeological artifact indicative