Guidance on writing scientific essays and reports in Nutrition KM Younger April 2014
General guidance: Be scientific in your approach. Use the passive. Avoid the use of emotive, sensationalist or journalistic language (eg ‘crucial’, ‘packed full of’). Use your own words rather than cutting and pasting whole passages from a website into your essay/report. The use of images is good, so long as you say where they came from, NB See DIT statement on plagiarism. Provide a word count, not including the references.
Marks will generally be awarded for scientific content, writing style, presentation and referencing.
Guidance on structure: Organise the material into coherent sections (rather than having bits of information dotted around in different sections). In reports and reviews (but not necessarily in essays), use appropriate subheadings; see recent review articles to get an idea how to do this. Avoid repetition. Try to tell a story, that is, have the material flow logically from one topic to the next. The conclusion should sum up what went before, and not introduce any new topics or concepts. If you are not sure, read a few ‘Conclusions’ from the literature.
For a literature review (eg for a project thesis), it is advisable to go from the general context: ‘there is x problem in nutrition/health’ to the specific area to be dealt with in the piece of work: ‘research into y area is needed’. In a project, this will then flow naturally on to the ‘Aims and Objectives’ of the piece of work.
For an essay covering a wide topic (eg ‘Nutrition and the skin’), don’t attempt to cover too many separate areas; it is better to cover a few key areas in useful scientific detail than to simply list nutrients that are important without EXPLAINING WHY they are important. Mechanisms of action MUST be given where possible, otherwise the depth provided is not sufficient for a scientific piece of work (it should read like an article aimed at the scientific rather than the lay reader). You should demonstrate that you understand the mechanisms; if you don’t then this will show up in the writing for sure. If you don’t understand the mechanisms, then avoid that topic.
Be specific, eg if you say ‘levels of nutrient x’ say whether this refers to levels in the diet, the gut, urine, an organ or tissue (eg the blood plasma), or somewhere specific within cells (eg the plasma membrane, mitochondria, cytosol).
When sourcing your material, use references from within the last 10 years (older ones will probably have been superseded by more recent research) except when you are citing original findings (eg the demonstration by the MRC vitamin research group that supplementary folic acid prevents NTDs, published in the Lancet in 1991). Recent scientific review articles (eg in the Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, Nutrition Research Reviews or Cochrane reviews) are a great place to start, and will give you a feel for what is currently regarded as important in the field.
Websites you refer to should be aimed at a scientific or health-care professional audience rather than a lay audience. As a general rule, if the website is trying to sell you something, don’t use it. If the website doesn’t give scientific back-up to its statements (ie peer-reviewed journal articles in reputable journals) don’t use it. The internet is a wonderful thing, but needs to be used critically!
To check the reputation of a journal, find the journal online (Google) and check its impact factor and ranking among Nutrition (or other class of) journals. If these are not given for the journal, it is probably not included in the citation system for good reasons, so treat what is published in the journal with caution. Self-published work ditto.
References should be cited just after any statement that requires support (unless it is an established fact eg ‘Nutrient status will impact on the health of skin’). Look at the literature to get a feel for how this should be done. NB A reference at the end of several sentences will be understood to support all of the statements since the last reference cited, so you don’t need to cite the same reference after every sentence.
Guidance on style and grammar: Write in clear, concise English. Avoid using ten words when one will do, or complex or unusual words that are not commonly understood (EXPLAIN unusual terms where necessary). Spell words correctly. Make sure the sentences actually make sense (if you get the comment ‘? Sense’, this means it doesn’t!). If you aren’t sure, have a colleague read the sentence to see if they get what you are trying to say. If English isn’t your first language, it is advisable to have someone for whom English is their first language read over your work to correct the use of English.
Avoid repetition of phrases within at least five lines of each other; this is poor style.
Avoid ambiguity at all costs; punctuation will help here. If in doubt about whether a comma, semicolon, colon, parentheses or hyphen are needed, try reading the sentence out loud to see where the pauses fall.
NB Hyphens are required to avoid ambiguity where you have words ‘clustered’ together, eg five-year-old boys (as distinct from five year-old boys).
NB Be careful how you use ‘its’; it is generally taken to refer to the last noun used eg ‘The incidence of NTDs has been shown to be reduced by supplementary Folic acid; its importance was proved in 1991….’ Rather than ‘Supplementary folic acid reduces the incidence of NTDs; its importance was proved in 1991….’ which is ambiguous as we don’t know whether the ‘its’ refers to the folic acid, or the incidence of NTDs. See http://www.towson.edu/ows/proref.htm for style suggestions that avoid ambiguity in the use of ‘its’ and ‘their’.
Be careful with apostrophes. See http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/apostro.asp for correct use.
Don’t confuse ‘affect’ (‘influences’) with ‘effect’ (‘brings about’). Word won’t spot this as it doesn’t know what you are trying to say.
Don’t begin a sentence with an abbreviation (eg NTDs), or with a number (eg 5-Methyl THFA); either find a way of rewording it so you don’t have to, or write it out in full.
When using an abbreviation, give it in parentheses after writing the phrase in full the first time it is used eg ‘neural tube defect (NTD)’. After this the abbreviation can be used. NB It is easier to read text that is not overloaded with abbreviations. If many abbreviations are used, a glossary is useful, but make sure it is complete.
Where a word/phrase is not English, it should be italicised: eg et al, in utero, trans etc.
It is generally accepted that where a vitamin has a number, this should be a subscript eg B12. Similarly, minerals may include a superscript number eg Fe2+ . Use other subscripts and superscripts correctly also eg H2O, 40K.
Ditto Greek letters eg a-linolenic acid. If you can’t use the Greek letter, write the name of the letter eg ‘alpha’.
Use SI units ie kJ, mJ, kcal, kg, g, mg, mg, L, mL (or ml), m, cm, mm, mol and mmol. NB lower case or capital matters!
If using decimal places, there should be something ahead of the zero, eg 2.5 or 0.5; don’t just put .5 as the decimal point is not then sufficiently obvious (it could just be a bit of dirt on the screen or the page!).
For descriptions of statistics NB Student’s t-test (lower case italic t) and significance P < 0.05 (capital italic P).
Guidance on reference lists:
You may be asked to use either the Harvard system ie author(s) plus date in the text, and listed alphabetically in the reference list; or the Vancouver system ie numbers (NB Arabic: 1,2,3, rather than Roman: i, ii, iii) in the text, preferably in ascending order, and listed in numeric order in the reference list. NB there are different versions of both of these systems, used by different journals/books, so be consistent. See eg guide to authors at https://authorservices.wiley.com/reference_text.asp?site=1.
For online information, give the website address ie the full url of the relevant page(s), and the date accessed ie do NOT put only www.pubmed.com, give the url of the page containing the article reference: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2114973?ordinalpos=3&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum (‘Analysis of Selenium content of commercial dietetic products’ by O’Sullivan KR and Mathias PM).
For books, give author(s), the title of book and edition where relevant; date published, publisher and page numbers of the relevant section. You may need to cite the author(s) of the chapter and the editors of the book if they are different: Eg Bender, D. (2009) ‘The vitamins’. In Gibney, M.J. et al (eds) ‘Introduction to Human Nutrition’, 2nd edition. Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 132-187.
For journal articles, give author(s), title of article, date published, name of journal, volume number and page numbers. Titles of journals may be abbreviated; check that this is done correctly and consistently.
NB take care to cite references correctly, consistently and completely, or you will lose marks.