REU Physics Writing Workshop 28
REU Physics Writing Workshop
Department of Physics, UF
PRESENTED BY
Dr. Mickey S Schafer
University Writing Program
Welcome to the REU Writing Workshop
Why a workshop on scientific writing? Consider the following from F. Peter Woodford:
Some of the worst [articles] are produced by the kind of author who consciously pretends to a "scientific scholarly" style. He takes what should be lively, inspiring, and beautiful and, in an attempt to make it seem dignified, chokes it to death with stately abstract nouns; next, in the name of scientific impartiality, he fits it with a complete set of passive constructions to drain away any remaining life's blood or excitement; then he embalms the remains in molasses of polysyllable, wraps the corpse in an impenetrable veil of vogue words, and buries the stiff old mummy with much pomp and circumstance in the most distinguished journal that will take it. Considered either as a piece of scholarly work or as a vehicle of communication, the product is appalling. (Science, Vol. 156, No. 3776 (May 12, 1967), pp. 743-745)
Woodford finishes the paragraph with the question: "Does it matter?" Nearly 45 years after his complaint, we are still asking the same question, and still answering "Yes, it matters". It matters because scientific progress depends on evidence and consensus -- the success of evidence relies on experimental design, but the success of the consensus turns solely on communication. Brigham Young University puts it this way:
What is real?
The work on your [research report] is perhaps the closest thing to a "real-world" experience that you will have in college. Nobody solves textbook problems or takes exams for a living. Soon, others will judge you primarily by your research initiative and on your ability to communicate; your college grades will be superfluous. For the first time (and far from the last) you will be expected to craft and define a problem which inevitably will be murky in the beginning. You will have to find and explain the context for that problem, including a clear summary of the related works of others. You must justify your choice of problem. The research for a [written report] will require initiative and imagination. You will have the opportunity to develop a clear description of your work and a coherent and concise argument for its conclusions. (http://www.physics.byu.edu/Undergraduate/Thesis.aspx/ [research/written report] are "senior thesis" in orginal)
Good scientific writing is more than a hypothetical concern.
This workshop addresses the immediate need to produce a written research report at the end of your research experience. It will also furnish you with transferable skills -- writing skills that will last the rest of your academic career. Why am I so confident of this? Because writing across the sciences require the same basic pieces of information delivered with the same basic style needs. This workshop will address these needs. You will leave knowing the structure of a scientific report, the template for building that structure, and the process for writing research efficiently and effectively.
The Research Report
Writing is/should be an integral part of research, not a separate activity...It is efficient to focus research on getting the information needed for the paper, rather than on wandering randomly in intellectual phase space. from Writing a Scientific Paper, George M Whitesides
If the research is worth writing, it is worth writing well. Elements of Style, Nature Physics
Scientific research begins with a question and ends with communication. Communication can happen in the lab, in informal conversation, in progress reports to the PI, in conference presentations, but to really get credit for your work, communication ends with a written report, submitted for publication.
What do you expect when you sit down to read a scientific article? You want to know “what happened?” and "why should I care?”. These are the two main questions that any research report has to answer. Historically, scientists themselves created a standardized format through which to answer these questions → this is the “research report”, and while each discipline has a slightly different take on how to write one, all science publication on experimental data is composed of 4 parts, each answering some part of “what happened” and “why should I care”.
What happened: 1) methods section; 2) results section
Why should I care: 1) Introduction; 2) Discussion/Conclusion
Fortunately, science report writing has been around a long time, thus has been conventionalized. This is a beautiful thing! Whatever scientific field you read in, you will recognize the basic parts of the research report: they are an idealized form of the scientific method itself.
Each of the functional headings -- Introduction, Methods/Materials, Results, Discussion/Conclusion -- has a template to guide writing; the templates specify the kind of information that should go in each section and suggest an order for the information, too. The template guiding writing is represented in the text through subheadings, titles, abstracts, in-text citations, figures, references, and all the other features that clearly signal that a document is a science research report.The template helps the writer communicate clearly, concisely, and comprehensibly. When the reader encounters the information in the expected order, the writer's credibility increases, too.
Introductions
...Next comes the most important paragraph of the whole paper: the first one. Even if it is a work of expositional genius, few among a broad audience are likely to read beyond it. So it is vital that this paragraph tells the central story of the paper, and makes clear why this story deserves to be told. Don't launch into technical details, or merely list what you did. Set the scene, explain the background — that will give the non-specialist reader a context in which to understand the significance of the work, but fellow specialists will also appreciate your telling them what you consider to be the relevant questions in the field. Elements of Style, Nature Physics
6 steps to Writing the Introduction
1. Establish Topic
2. Provide significance
3. Review the relevant literature
4. Point out the gap
5. Reveal the research question/statement
6. Discuss primary Results and central Conclusion
The first 5 steps include information that is found solely in the Introduction -- they tell the "story" (in scientific terms) of how the experimental information (Methods, Results, Discussion) came to be. The introduction is also the only place where the researcher explains the motivation for the work.
We'll use a recent publication to exemplify each of these steps.
Single domain to multi-domain transition due to in-plane magnetic anisotropy in phase separated (La0.4Pr0.6)0.67Ca0.33MnO3 thin films
Hyoungjeen Jeen and Amlan Biswas*
Department of Physics, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida 32611, USA
(Received 25 October 2010; published 11 February 2011) (pre-print version in Arxiv)
Note: Physics writers have the tendency to write in very long paragraphs...at this stage of writing, use shorter paragraphs. You can always remove paragraph breaks for publication, but the short paragraph style will make the paper easier to assess. Here are two options for the Introduction.
Option #1 (if long lit review): paragraph 1 -- topic, significance; paragraph 2 -- lit review; paragraph 3 -- gap, research question, results + conclusion
Option #2 (if short lit review): paragraph 1 -- topic, significance, lit review; paragraph 2 -- gap, research question, results + conclusion
Establish Topic
You might have noticed while reading in the research literature that research reports tend to start immediately – there’s very little “warm up” material involved. Nevertheless, we are so used to writing this way that it may not be possible to just start at the beginning. If this is the case, go back and cross out the first couple of lines.
The coupling between structure, transport, and magnetism in hole-doped manganites leads to phenomena such as, colossal magnetoresistance (CMR), colossal electroresistance (CER), photo-induced metal-insulator transition, and colossal piezoresistance (CPR)1–5.
Provide Significance
The second step to the introduction is to offer the first bit of persuasion to the reader: show the importance of the topic by offering something of practical or research significance. Significance comes from the research literature, too, and is usually established in terms of practical application or research significance.
While these properties could lead to future applications in devices such as bolometers and cryogenic memories, manganites are already providing a unique insight into the effect of competing phases on the physical properties of materials6,7.
Review the Literature
Following the first paragraph which introduces the topic and provides significance, the writer must now review the literature for the reader. The literature review (hereafter, “lit review,” the short phrase used by research writers everywhere) accomplishes many objectives at once.
· First, the lit review informs the reader of the most important research needed to understand the research question.
· Second, the lit review gives credibility to the writer as someone who knows what they are talking about.
· Third, the lit review is organized so that the research question is validated; in other words, the review leads the reader to a “gap” or “conflict” in the literature.
It is now widely accepted that phenomena such as CMR are consequences of the competition among different phases with similar free energy. Such competition leads to phase coexistence among three distinct phases, viz. cubic ferromagnetic metallic (FMM), pseudo-tetragonal (more precisely orthorhombic) antiferromagnetic charge ordered insulating (AFM-COI), and pseudo-cubic paramagnetic insulating (PMI) phases, in materials such as (La1−yPry)1−xCaxMnO3 8–10. In addition to well-known effects such as CMR and CER, the coexistence of the three magnetic phases also leads to unique phenomena such as temperature dependent magnetic domain transition and ellipsoidal growth of the FMM phase, which have been observed using Lorentz microscopy in very narrow temperature ranges11. Due to the same coupling between crystal structure, transport, and magnetism, manganite thin films have shown properties distinct from bulk behavior such as substrate strain induced metal-insulator transition and anisotropic transport due to strain fields from substrates12,13. The effect of strain on the transport properties of manganites has been widely studied and it is accepted that multiphase coexistence and percolation play a significant role2,9,10.
Point out the Gap
The “gap” in the literature is a conflict or missing piece of information that your research question will answer. If the research has already been done, then why waste your time and the reader’s time with all this work? The gap also explicitly identifies the contribution a piece of research makes. It’s as though the writer is saying “See, Scientific Community, this is what we know but this is what we do not know.” The reader needs to be shown that this gap exists in order to believe that the research is valid. Providing the gap is part of the writer’s job.
Note: The "gap" is the only place where the writer/researcher should draw attention to possible unanswered questions. Unlike Review papers where the writer points out unresolved issues as part of the critique, in a research report of any kind, ALL questions posed in the Introduction are supposed to be addressed via the experiment. Limit questions to only those your research is set up to answer. (The other questions still left may be taken up in the Discussion section.)
However, the effect of strain on the magnetism of phase separated manganites is more subtle and is still being debated. One such problem is the distinction between intrinsic magnetic properties and extrinsic effects on magnetic properties of manganite thin films. For example, when La0.77Ca0.33MnO3 thin films were grown on single crystalline NdGaO3 substrates, Mathur et al. concluded that the in-plane magnetic anisotropy originated not from stress anisotropy but from magnetocrystalline anisotropy14.
Reveal the Research Question
The final non-experimental part of the Introduction is the Research Question – this is the part that everything else has been leading to. This is where the writer presents the question that will answer the gap as revealed by the literature to be a missing piece of the topic’s research puzzle! The RQ may be expressed as either an actual question or a declarative sentence. Some journals seem to prefer that research writer’s express the RQ as a question; some prefer the RQ is expressed as statement. Following the research question may be a hint of method, hypotheses, or nothing at all.
Here, we report that substrate induced stress plays an integral role in determining the magnetic properties of manganite thin films.
Discuss Primary Results and Central Conclusion
The introduction ends with a brief statement of the primary result (which demonstrates why you bothered writing all of this up in the first place!) and the main concluding thought the researcher/s want the reader to understand.
We observe that in-plane stress anisotropy leads to an in-plane magnetic anisotropy and a magnetic domain transition as a function of temperature in phase separated (La1−yPry)1−xCaxMnO3 (x = 0.33 and y = 0.6) thin films grown on (110) NdGaO3 substrates with anisotropic in-plane strain. Our data show that while anisotropic stress has a profound effect on the magnetism, the in-plane resistivity of the films remains virtually isotropic. / By comparing our results for the films on anisotropic NGO to those grown on isotropic (001) SrLaGaO4 (SLGO) substrates, we conclude that anisotropic strain can be used to control the magnetic “hardness” i.e. the coercive field in a mixed phase manganite. Such control could play an important role in the design of nanomagnetic devices.
Methods -- Experimental Details
This is the "how" section of your research report. Precision and exact details are key to this section, but do not include irrelevant material. This concrete infomation is usually presented in simple past tense, either active voice ("We collected water samples every three days") or passive voice ("Samples were collected every three days"). The ultimate test of a well-written Methods section is in replicability -- could someone else reproduce the study given what you wrote?
Include enough information about materials and methods to enable another suitably qualified person to repeat your experiments. Relegate tedious but necessary details to an Appendix, so that there are no breaks in the flow of ideas in your presentation. from "How to Write a Thesis"
Interestingly, most of the sources on how to write a research report don't have much to say about the methods section. I believe this is because most scientists find this section the easiest to write. The researcher is most familiar with this activity; after all, s/he experienced it! The Experimental Details are written much how they are performed: materials followed by procedure in chronological order. Precision and accuracy are critical -- use an outline to help you keep track of all the information you need to write.