Page 38 - Becoming Metric Wise

27
Scientific Research and Communication

2.3.3 Structure of a Research Paper and Major Steps
Between Submission and Publication

Structure of a Research Article
An article has a title and usually shows its author(s) and address(es) in the
byline under the title. This is followed by an abstract and, often, a set of
keywords. The main part of the article typically follows the IMRaD
structure, where IMRaD stands for Introduction, Methods, Results and
Discussion. In some fields, a short literature review is expected, placed
between the Introduction and the Methods section, while usually there is
also a Conclusion after the Discussion chapter. Then there is room for
acknowledgements and finally a reference list, sometimes followed by an
appendix and supplementary online material.
Not all articles strictly follow this scheme, but the above is a general
guideline. Describing methods should not be confounded with describing
the results, while discussions of these results are for the discussion section,
which, again, is not the same as stating a conclusion. Note that the main
conclusion should also be part of the abstract.
Nowadays this abstract is often required to be a structured abstract.
A structured abstract has a fixed structure, consisting of: Purpose, design/-
methods/approach, findings, research limitations, implications, value and/
or originality. On the one hand, this structure makes searching for infor-
mation easier, but on the other hand it is obvious that prescribing to fol-
low this structure is counterproductive for articles based on pure logical
thinking or which are the result of a serendipitous observation.

Major Steps Between Submission and Publication
When the editorial office receives a submission it is first checked for for-
mal completeness. Does the submission have a title; are authors, their
institutes and addresses unambiguously reported; is there a corresponding
author; have the roles of the authors been revealed (if this is a require-
ment); are there references; has supplementary information been submit-
ted? Are figures and formulae clear and readable?
The editor checks if the article falls within the scope of the journal,
otherwise it is immediately rejected (a so-called desk rejection, also see
the next chapter). Nowadays many editorial offices submit submissions to
a plagiarism detection system, before it is sent to one or more reviewers.
When receiving the reviewers’ reports, the Editor-in-Chief (in short:
EIC) reports their findings to the author(s). For those papers that have to
be revised and resubmitted the EIC reviews the changes and checks if all