GEOG/ES&P 330

California Ecosystems

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Common structures for scientific papers and presentations

If you look through refereed journal articles, you will notice a very common organization, which I encourage you to use in this project. Indeed, look through the master's theses completed in your department, and you will notice the chapter structure is very similar. This is, basically, a common way of structuring the communication of research in a wide variety of natural and social sciences.

It generally consists of five or six sections, the particular configuration varying a bit because of the different needs of a given project. Here is a table summarizing three common variants:

Variant A:
  1. Introduction (including literature review, purpose, hypotheses or research questions, and the structure of the rest of the paper)
  2. Data and Methods (including data sources, collection methods, processing methods, analytic methods, and any problems or shortcomings and how you dealt with them)
  3. Results (question by question or hypothesis by hypothesis: what happened?)
  4. Discussion (where you relate your results to the literature and draw out the importance of your fndings)
  5. Conclusions (emphasize directions for future research or recommendations; research problems that you couldn't resolve could be discussed as suggestions for future work)
Variant B:
  1. Introduction (including purpose, importance, hypotheses or research questions, and the structure of the rest of the paper)
  2. Literature Review (some projects require discussion of a lot of classic and contemporary literature, enough to fill up an entire separate section)
  3. Data and Methods (including data sources, collection methods, processing methods, analytic methods, and any problems or shortcomings and how you dealt with them)
  4. Results and Discussion (sometimes it is easier to discuss findings and their meaning together)
  5. Conclusions
Variant C:
  1. Introduction (including purpose, importance, hypotheses or research questions, and the structure of the rest of the paper)
  2. Study Area (some projects are based on one or a few case studies and it may be necessary to provide a detailed description of it/them and any geological, meteorological, climatological, historical, political, or cultural characteristics needed to understand the context)
  3. Data and Methods (including data sources, collection methods, processing methods, analytic methods, and any problems or shortcomings and how you dealt with them)
  4. Results
  5. Discussion
  6. Conclusions

 

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Document maintained by Dr. Rodrigue
First placed on web: 09/29/15
Last revision: 03/21/16
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