Writing a scholarly article

I. Prewriting

Planning the article

A scholarly article is a standard document. Its’ arrangement is fairly standard and serves to organize the contents of the manuscript:

• Title
• Author name(s) and address(es)
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Main body of the article
• Conclusions/Summary
• Acknowledgments
• References Cited
• Illustrations and Figure captions
• Tables

Look through some scholarly articles in your area of interest. Do all of them have the same structure? What are the main sections of articles? Write them out.

Title and Key Words

The title is the first thing that the reader sees and this often determines whether they will read further. If you want to capture their attention, the title needs to encapsulate the subject of the article. The best way to do that is to use key words.

For example, for the article about pyrolysis and gasification of food waste the key words are as follows: Food waste gasification; Char gasification kinetics; Catalytic effect of ash; Compensation effect

For the article about the importance of play in children’s development the authors use the following key words:

Children, adolescents, play, parents, resilience, mental health, college, schedules

You certainly know what your article is going to be about. Think about the key words. There should be from 3 up to 7 key words.

Making the Title

Try to make your title interesting. The more specific the information you give in the title, the more likely someone will read your article. On the other hand, avoid too long titles. The recommended length for a title is 10 to 12 words.

Try to make your title specific enough to describe the contents of the article, but not so technical that only specialists will understand.

Which of the following titles can be considered good and which are not so good? Prove your opinion.

1. A complete plesiosaur skull from the Niobrara Formation of Kansas.
2. Realistic Plan Sought for D.C. Schools.
3. Butterfly Fossils from Colorado.
4. Pyrolysis and gasification of food waste: Syngas characteristics and char gasification kinetics.
5. A new ammonite specimen showing iridescent color from the Trail City Member of the Fox Hills Formation, Corson County, northern South Dakota, USA.
6. Md. School Assessment Supplants National Tests.
7. A Butterfly Fossil Showing Color Patterns.
8. Scientific Translation and its Social Functions: a Descriptive-Functional Approach to Scientific Textbook Translation in China.
9. The Importance of Play in Promoting Healthy Child Development and Maintaining Strong Parent-Child Bonds.
10. Heat integrated heat pumping for biomass gasification processing.

Remember to come back to your title and make it perfect after finishing the whole article.

Outlining the article

You don't have to create clean or fully developed text of the article the first time. Try putting down your ideas as they come, without looking up spelling or other details. You will be able to create a full draft quickly, and then you can go back and make it perfect.

Here is an example of an outline for an essay on “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare from the University of Toronto website (http://www.utoronto.ca/ucwriting/organizing.html#sample).

Thesis: Despite Hamlet's highly developed moral nature, he becomes morally compromised while delaying his revenge.
I.	Introduction: Hamlet's father asks Hamlet not only to seek vengeance but also to keep his mind untainted.
II.	Hamlet has a highly developed moral nature.
	A.	Hamlet is idealistic.
	B.	Hamlet is aware of his own faults, whereas others are self-satisfied.
	C.	Hamlet does not want to take revenge without grounds for acting.
III.	Hamlet becomes morally compromised while delaying.
	A.	The turning point in Hamlet's moral decline is his killing of Polonius.
	B.	Hamlet's moral decline continues when he sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their death.
	C.	Hamlet already began his moral decline before the turning point in the play, the killing of Polonius.
		1.	Hamlet treats women badly.
		2.	Hamlet criticizes others in the play for acting falsely to get ahead, but in adopting the disguise of madness he, too, is presenting a false face to the world.
IV.	Though Hamlet becomes more compromised the longer he delays, killing the king would have been a morally questionable act.
V.	Conclusion: The play Hamlet questions the adequacy of a system of ethics based on honour and revenge.

Make the outline of your article taking into consideration the main obligatory sections of an article in your field of interest.

II. Literature review

A literature review should:

• be organized around and related directly to the thesis or research question you are developing;
• synthesize results into a summary of what is and is not known;
• identify areas of controversy in the scientific literature;
• formulate questions that need further research.

Do not try to list all the material published on the topic, but to synthesize and evaluate it according to the guiding concept of your research question. It's usually a bad sign to see every paragraph beginning with the name of a researcher. Instead, organize the literature review into sections that present themes or identify trends, including relevant theory.

In the literary review you may feel free to criticize. But criticize the work, not the investigators or authors. Please see the following examples.

Example 1

Looking at the development of the hydrogen technologies road map from Cavendish to the present day, many research studies [2,12,15,20,24,27,28] have been conducted and reported in the literature. Although many researchers [4,9,10,13,22,25,30] have made significant contributions to improving hydrogen technologies and awareness, the present global energy system is dominated by fossil fuels, and this pattern is expected to continue till 2030. An important question is for how long these business-as-usual projections can continue without running into constraints in the form of limited reserves of fossil fuels, or severe environmental problems from their combustion, including not only global climate change from CO2 and methane emissions, but also air pollution problems [23].

Holland and Provenzano [19] stated as the age of hydrogen is close at hand. According to Holland and Provenzano, a few decades from now, perhaps by the middle of the twenty first century, hydrogen likely will have replaced oil as the world’s primary on-demand energy currency. Or is hydrogen really a utopia [7]?

(Source: Melih Soner Celiktas, Gunnur Kocar. Hydrogen is not an utopia for Turkey. International Journal of hydrogen energy 35 (2010) 9–18)

Example 2

Montesinos et al. obtained a value of isokinetic temperature of 1150 K. The isokinetic temperature is the temperature at which all reactivities are equal for different conversions. An isokinetic temperature of 1449 K was obtained by Dhupe et al. [6] for CO₂ gasification using catalyzed sodium lignosulfonate. Feistel et al. [7] found this temperature to be 1425 K, obtained using potassium-catalyzed steam gasification.

Gokarn and Muhlen [8] investigated the gasification of char using two types of catalysts and a mixture of both the catalysts. The investigated catalysts were calcium lignosulfonate and sodium lignosulfonate. The carbon matrix was saturated by calcium lignosulfonate at 10% by weight. However, this saturation did not affect the catalytic effect of sodium lignosulfonate in the mixed catalytic system.

Li and Cheng [9] investigated the catalytic gasification of coal char using Na₂CO₃ and K₂CO₃ as catalysts.

(Source: I.I. Ahmed, A.K. Gupta. Pyrolysis and gasification of food waste: Syngas characteristics and char gasification kinetics. Applied Energy 87 (2010) 101–108)

Please read the article about writing the literature review on the University of Toronto website: http://www.writing.utoronto.ca/advice/specific-types-of-writing/literature-review. What tips from these recommendations can be useful for you?