Research paper guidelines
Research paper guidelines
First of all, probably you know but for each of the universities I work with there are some general guidelines
Some general methodology advise
Start using a notebook (Rmd/Ipynb) to document your methodology. These papers are examples which you can read the code and resulting articles from:
- Paper by Hut et al. 2022 and its methodology on GitHub
Standardize your dataset and apply a CamelCase naming convention in ENGLISH.
Read the FAIR principle paper in Nature and guidelines and make sure you understand how this is related to your work!
One of the very popular visualization tools we use is http://tableau.com. You can get a version of it using this tutorial (https://bovi-analytics.com/tutorials/tableau.html )! Start working with it to create descriptive statistics.
Create a repository in the Bovi-Analytics Github repository (or ask someone to do it)
Make it private first (we can decide to make it public when feasible)
Add a CC-BY-NC-ND licence to the repository, this can be done by adding a file named LICENSE (!without extension), which has this content.
You can checkout other people’s repositories on our github account to start exploring similar work.
Create a final version of the notebook and submit it to the repository. I aim to start grading this as part of the thesis.
When writing down data from dairy, you probably will have inclusion and exclusion criteria being applied. Try to make this as transparent as possible e.g. by creating a data flow chart. See example here.
Some general writing advise
Often less is more!
First of all, use AI tools to aid your writing, not to do the writing for you.
When you start writing, choose one specific time in which you write. Don’t combine present and past time. My personal preference is the past time.
Make a clear distinction between the materials&methods and results section. Try to split these 2 clearly.
Tables have a caption ABOVE the table. Easiest to create a row on top of the table, merge all cells to one and add the title in there.
When adding figures in word, use a 1-column, 2-row table (with transparent borders) where you put the figure in the first cell, the figure caption in the second cell, that way they will always move together, and it’s more easy to format.
Work on your graphics (see this article for some guidance). Make sure to make use of the data-to-ink-ratio concept.