Writing the main body of the article

The structures of the main of articles can differ from each other.

Look through some scientific articles in your area of interest. What are the main sections of them?

The Method Section

Sometimes in scientific papers you will find headings such as Materials and Methods or Methodology, which lists specimens used in the study and what methods or procedures were applied to them. This allows other scientists to replicate the study, and hopefully to get the same results, or judge the scientific merit of your work. It is not to be a step by step description of everything you did, nor is a methods section a set of instructions.

Example 1

Methodology. The strategic and integrated matching of available heating/cooling resources in the processes, with heat rejection to/from the HP systems is able to significantly enhance thermal efficiency and cost-effectiveness for the whole process when a HP is applied as a means of producing high-grade heat from low-grade or waste heat. A major challenge in the design of HP systems comes from the complexity of energy integration. The design of HP system is highly interactive and interlinked to the processes. In industrial applications the process often consists of several streams to be cooled or heated to the required levels of temperature. This heating and cooling demand from individual streams could be merged and represented by Grand composite curves (GCC) [11–13]. They show the collective characteristics of heating and cooling information of the whole system. Information obtained from the GCC is then used for synthesis of utility systems [14–16].

(Source: Martin Pavlas, Petr Stehlík, Jaroslav Oral, Jirí Klemešc, Jin-Kuk Kim, Barry Firth. Heat integrated heat pumping for biomass gasification processing. Applied Thermal Engineering 30 (2010) 30–35).

Example 2

Methodology: This study describes the effectiveness of PCIT with 136 biological parent-child dyads in which 66.9% (N= 91) of the children had been maltreated. Of the 91 maltreated children, 64.8% (N= 59) of the parents had maltreated their children, and were thus considered to be at high risk of repeating the abuse.

(Source: Susan G. Timmer, Anthony J. Urquiza, Nancy M. Zebell, Jean M. McGrath. Parent-Child Interaction Therapy: Application to maltreating parent-child dyads. Child Abuse & Neglect 29 (2005) 825–842)

Example 3

In this study, data was used from 350 patients (175 in each arm) treated using the Glucontrol protocol at CHU de Liege, Belgium, between March 2004 and April 2005. Thus, the Glucontrol data used in this study is from only one centre out of the full study [26]. The selection criteria for patients used in this analysis to generate virtual patients with sufficient data density [15,16,27] are shown in Figure 1. Patients were eliminated from the analysis if they received no insulin for their entire stay (per protocol), had less than 5 BG measurements or received little or no (recorded) carbohydrate administration (in any form) for more than 48 hours of their stay.

(Source: Chase J.G. et al. Validation of a model-based virtual trials method for tight glycemic control in intensive care. BioMedical Engineering OnLine 2010, 9:84, http://www.biomedical-engineering-online.com)

The Results Section

In this section you should present evidence that your study successfully set up the conditions for testing your hypotheses or answering your questions. The page length of this section is set by the amount and types of data to be reported. Continue to be concise, using figures and tables, if appropriate, to present results most effectively. Do not draw conclusions in the Results section, reserve data interpretation for the Discussion section.

Example 1

Table 1 shows the results of the analyses for determining predictors of early termination from treatment. Coefficients presented in Table 1 are odds ratios. They reflect the degree to which the odds of an event occurring (i.e., dropping out of treatment) are increased by each unit increase in the predictor variable. For example, in Model 1, when only demographic variables are entered into the model, African American children were twice as likely as Caucasian children to end treatment early. When measures of psychological functioning were added in Model 2, higher levels of psychological symptoms in parents and not completing the measure of parents’ psychological functioning (SCL-90R) predicted early treatment termination. Children’s severity of behavior problems did not significantly predict attrition. However, when interaction terms between children’s maltreatment history and measures of psychological functioning were added in Model 3, we found that the likelihood that children with severe behavior problems would stay in treatment varied by the their history of maltreatment.

(Source: Susan G. Timmer, Anthony J. Urquiza, Nancy M. Zebell, Jean M. McGrath. Parent-Child Interaction Therapy: Application to maltreating parent-child dyads. Child Abuse & Neglect 29 (2005) 825–842)

Example 2

The majority of the Delphi survey respondents were from 26 different universities (63%), automotive, textile, consultant, gas distributor, electricity generation industries (13%), six different governmental organizations (12%) research institutions (5%) and other institutions (7%) (Fig. 1). The respondents were classified into 5 different age groups (Fig. 2) and the gender distribution was 76.7% male and 23.3% female.

The time of occurrence was evaluated on the data from the first and second round of the Delphi results which is presented in Fig. 3. The Delphi statements and their time of occurrence were assessed by all participants. The number of the respondents and the distribution (%) were displayed on the left side of the figure. A slight shift towards a later time of occurrence between the first and second round was observed for the majority of the statements which is a typical outcome of the Delphi technique and can be interpreted as a greater degree of consensus among the respondents.

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

The Discussion Section

The Discussion section can either be combined with the Results section or appear separately. The objective of the Discussion section is to provide an interpretation of your results and support for all of your conclusions, using evidence from your experiment and generally accepted knowledge, if appropriate. The Discussion explains the meaning of the results. The significance of findings should be clearly described.

Example 1

In terms of the impact, it should be noted that the statement ‘‘Nanocomposite catalysts developed for hydrogen generation by methane reforming processes are manufactured in industrial scale’’ had a very low wealth creation score compared to the statement ‘‘Hydrogen production from biomass has been realised in industrial scale’’ which was ranked with the highest score. However, the ranking based on environmental impact and quality of life differed somewhat from the total impact ranking. While the lowest ranked is the same statement of the total impact ranked, but the top ranked was different. On the other hand, the statement ‘‘Continuous bioprocesses have been developed for hydrogen production via microorganisms and solar energy’’ was ranked as the highest for both environmental impact and quality of life. Statements 6, 9 and 10 were all ranked higher in the ranking based on all impact measures. ‘‘Hydrogen is used in energy systems as a common practice’’ received the highest ranking in terms of security of supply. On the other hand, statement 13 was ranked very low for all impact measures except security of supply and Statement 7 was relatively low in regards to security of supply compared to the total ranking list.

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

Example 2

The primary goal of this study was to determine whether PCIT was an effective intervention for maltreated children and their offending or non-offending parents. The first step in testing PCIT’s effectiveness was to determine whether the therapy was engaging and rewarding enough to keep high-risk dyads in treatment. Results of our analyses predicting early treatment termination showed that among maltreated children, the more behavior problems parents reported, the less likely they were to complete treatment. These findings suggest that characteristics of children unique to their maltreatment history influence their parents’ engagement in PCIT. For example, it is possible that when parents of abused children report more extreme behavior problems, they are signaling their perception that these children did not want to be with them. Alternately, they could be communicating their own inability to work with the child. Since these high-risk parent-child dyads are judged to have an urgent need for mental health services to diminish the children’s risk of reabuse, we find these results disturbing. We hope that future work investigating the effectiveness of PCIT in high-risk populations will also develop and test different methods for keeping these clients in treatment.

(Source: Susan G. Timmer, Anthony J. Urquiza, Nancy M. Zebell, Jean M. McGrath. Parent-Child Interaction Therapy: Application to maltreating parent-child dyads. Child Abuse & Neglect 29 (2005) 825–842)

Not every article will have Materials, Methods, Results, or Discussion sections, especially if your article is descriptive. Regardless of how many sections you have, you need some sort of title so that the reader knows that they are no longer reading the Introduction.