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9 Tips to Improve Readability and Language in Your Research Paper

“As far as he can achieve it, readability is as important for the scientific writer as it is for the novelist.” – Donald O. Hebb

Research paper language and its readability plays a crucial role in communicating your research ideas to the reader. People are busy and have no time to slog through long sentences or complex languages in research papers. However, research analyzing over 700,000 abstracts from 123 medical and science journals found that there has been a steady decrease in readability over the years. 1 These results are concerning for scientists and the wider public, including policymakers, as they impact both the reproducibility and accessibility of your research findings.

The more complex your research idea, the simpler your language should be. This will allow your readers to engage with the research ideas instead of struggling with the language of your research paper. There are several guidelines and toolkits from learned associations that help novice and seasoned authors alike to improve readability. For example, the European Association of Science Editing (EASE) provides author guidelines on preparing manuscripts, with suggestions aimed at improving the language quality of research works and manuscripts. 2

Reporting your research findings clearly and accurately in journals or conferences is a fundamental part of the scientific process, facilitating both knowledge dissemination and the reproducibility of results. One measure of your research quality is the influence your research work has on the field of study. For this, researchers must be confident in their study design, research methodology, results, interpretations, and conclusions. However, journals seek to publish high-quality research that meets their target audience’s demands and will reject papers with poor research paper language, poor readability or grammar errors in order to sustain their reputation.

The quality of your research and the manuscript are two different things. 3 While you might have a personal writing style as an author, it needs to be precise and unambiguous to be effective. If the language of research papers that you write is not readable and contains simple writing mistakes, it will probably decrease your chance of being accepted. Thus, the research paper language and its readability are the final factors determining your publishing success and your paper’s impact. It is important to spend time checking your research paper, as every good piece of writing requires many revisions. Once you draft your manuscript, it is advisable to check the paper repeatedly for grammar, consistency and accuracy in writing.

How to improve your research paper language and readability

• Proofread for elementary mistakes: Grammatically correct usage of the language of research papers is very important. Basic mistakes in spelling, punctuation, spacing, and grammar leave a very poor impression. A simple grammar check of your research paper can help avoid these often avoidable mistakes.
• Keep it simple: When it comes to the research paper language, keeping it simple will make your work more accessible to others. If you can delete something, then you should. If you can delete something, then you should.
• Maintain consistency and logical flow in your writing: Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” As a writer, you should strive for consistency in using hyphens, units of measure, punctuation, grammar, symbols, capitalization, and acronyms.
• Avoid redundancy : Redundancy is the repetition of words and phrases that, if omitted, will not impair the meaning but make the text polished and easier to follow. Therefore, replace “due to the fact that” with “because,” “In the form of” with “As,” “In many cases” with “Often” and “has the ability to” with “can.”
• Use reader-friendly fonts: Most journals suggest using user-friendly fonts, such as Times New Roman, Arial, and Helvetica, which are easy on the eye.
• Shorten your words and sentences: Long sentences affect the readability of articles and the overall language of research papers. Check your paper for short and simple sentences, focusing on introducing ‘one idea per sentence.’ You can also read well-edited multi-disciplinary journals such as Science and Nature to learn more about the short and simple writing style.
• Frontload your sentences: The most important information should be mentioned at the beginning of the sentence rather than at the end. When a sentence is frontloaded, the reader can quickly assess significant information. This will attract the attention of your readers and make it more readable.
• Pay attention to reviewer comments: Common criticisms from reviewers concerning language of the research paper include unclear and poorly written manuscripts, inappropriate structure, lengthy manuscripts, unclear Discussion sections, and information redundancy. Focus on areas where you have received negative comments in your earlier manuscripts when working on your next one.
• Test your writing using readability formulas:  Finally, in the era of data metrics, you can check the average readability using an ‘r-index’ such as the New Dale-Chall (NDC) readability score or the Automated Readability Index. A grade level of 7 or 8 is considered good. 4
• Plaven-Sigray, P., Matheson, G.J., Schiffler, B. C., & Thompson, W.H. Research: The readability of scientific texts is decreasing over time. eLife,  27725 (2017).
• Kojima, T., & Barron, J.P. How Readability Can Improve Your Manuscript.  日本消化器外科学会雑誌 ,  48 (1), 83-84 (2015).
• Zimmerman, J.L. Improving a manuscript’s readability and likelihood of publication.  Issues in Accounting Education ,  4 (2), 458-466 (1989).
• Svider, P. F., Agarwal, N., Choudhry, O. J., Hajart, A. F., Baredes, S., Liu, J. K., & Eloy, J.A. Readability assessment of online patient education materials from academic otolaryngology–head and neck surgery departments.  American Journal of Otolaryngology ,  34 (1), 31-35 (2013).

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Related Reads:

• Duplicate Publications: How to Avoid Overlapping Publications in Research
• Confusing Elements of a Research Paper That Trip Up Most Academics
• 3 Easy Ways for Researchers to Improve Their Academic Vocabulary
• Self-Editing: The Pros and Cons of Editing Your Own Research Paper

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How to use appropriate academic language in research papers?

Many enter academic writing due to a passion for knowledge or to conduct independent research. Impactful writing in the academic world requires communicating ideas by using appropriate academic language, clarity, and grace. Most forms of writing such as email, texting, letters, etc. make use of informal language. Academic and scientific writing, however, requires the use of appropriate academic language. A good flow of writing leaves a lasting impression on the readers. Thus, it is essential to convey information and views concisely and clearly. This article offers insights on how to improve academic language in a paper.

Avoid information overload

Bloated language is not academic language.

This misconception among writers is that supplementary words or sentences add more smartness and show in-depth knowledge about the subject. However, this unnecessary fluffing of words frustrates the reader and makes the content unnecessarily complex. A good academic paper is clear and concise. Wastage of words and repetition are avoided as many journals regulate a word limit. Some examples showing the difference between ‘bloated’ and concise sentences are shown below.

Get rid of redundant or wordy phrases

In the English language, there is the presence of many phrases that have multiple words. Although a writer needs to be cognizant of wordiness, a fine line exists between rambling and expressing. Therefore the use of these phrases must be avoided if they can be expressed in lesser words. For example:

Even, the word “etc.” should not be paired with “including”, “such as”, or “for example” because these words specifically mean that list is indicative and not exhaustive.

Everyday spoken language is not an academic language

Use appropriate academic language that is organized, and logical and avoids a detached tone. Usually, writers adapt to everyday spoken language, but the use of casual language should be avoided.

Use varying sentence structure

Sentence structure represents the physical structure of a sentence. For making an impactful research paper, it is important to use variegated words but avoid their overuse. Furthermore, repeating longer sentences may overshadow the argument and inundate the reader. Even frequent usage of short sentences makes arguments stunted or rushed. Therefore try to keep the length of sentences short and up to 20 words.

Use sufficient referencing and citation

Academic papers to a great extent rely on the review of existing information in the form of secondary research. When reviewing secondary studies, references must be provided. It helps to establish the validity and credibility of the information. Although there is no standard rule for the number of references to use in a study, as a hand rule consider an average, of 1 reference per 100- 150 words.

Today, a vast number of elements contribute towards creating work-life balance in employees. The findings of Yadav & Dabhade (2014) identified rewards, mentally challenging work, favourable working conditions, supportive coworkers, and employee-friendly policies as some of the factors leading to work-life balance and job satisfaction. (Chaitra, Kumar, & Renuka, 2016) also identified some of the factors that impact work-life balance. The study collected data from 60 respondents and applied descriptive statistics and analysis of variance (ANOVA) technique for analyzing the data. It was found that over time, meetings, travelling to work, and training after working hours influence the work-life balance of the employees. (Sharma & Shekhawat, 2017) assessed the association between employee performance and work-life balance in the hotel industry of Rajasthan in India. The main aim of their analysis was to determine the factors affecting the work-life balance of the employees.

Refer to the right sources of secondary information

The type of secondary sources referred to while writing greatly affects the quality of the paper. For example, if you refer more to blogs and web pages then your content is likely to be ambiguous. This is because web pages are written to target the masses. For example –

The above figure shows that the flow of sentences is informal with the usage of first-person pronouns and the exclusion of references to validate the information. Thus, this article is less suitable for academic writing, whereas the below study is a more suitable source of information.

On the other hand, referring to more academic sources such as journal papers and books academic journals are more structured and precise with clear content. It is likely to make your content more technically sound with less redundant information.

Importance of grammar check in academic language

Making grammatical mistakes while writing is common but avoidable. Eliminating grammatical errors improves the quality of the paper. Fortunately, there are many applications available that help to track and correct these errors instantly. Grammarly is one of the most popular and convenient applications. Installing the Grammarly plug-in helps remove mistakes while writing.

The figure below presents an example of the use of Grammarly for grammar and spell check while writing. It shows that the phrase “in the event that” is redundant and can be reduced to “if”.

Academic writing is an organized and information-oriented work, that requires a clear, concise, powerful, and graceful representation of ideas. Though often due to lack of practice or knowledge, writers tend to make mistakes. However, for impactful study, it is essential to empower yourself with knowledge, mix the sentence structure, and write to express not impress.

• Lokhande, N., & Gundimeda, H. (2021). MGNREGA: The Guaranteed Refuge for Returning Migrants During COVID-19 Lockdown in India. The Indian Economic Journal . https://doi.org/10.1177/00194662211023848
• Natali, D., & Terlizzi, A. (2021). The impact of Covid-19 on the future of pensions in the EU. ETUC SociAll Project 2018/08 Thematic Report , 4–7.
• Spicer, A. (2020). Organizational Culture and COVID-19. Journal of Management Studies , 57 (8), 1737–1740. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12625
• Takyi, P. O., & Bentum-Ennin, I. (2021). The impact of COVID-19 on stock market performance in Africa: A Bayesian structural time series approach. Journal of Economics and Business , 115 (xxxx), 105968. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeconbus.2020.105968
• Priya Chetty

Priya is the co-founder and Managing Partner of Project Guru, a research and analytics firm based in Gurgaon. She is responsible for the human resource planning and operations functions. Her expertise in analytics has been used in a number of service-based industries like education and financial services.

Her foundational educational is from St. Xaviers High School (Mumbai). She also holds MBA degree in Marketing and Finance from the Indian Institute of Planning and Management, Delhi (2008).

Some of the notable projects she has worked on include:

• Using systems thinking to improve sustainability in operations: A study carried out in Malaysia in partnership with Universiti Kuala Lumpur.
• Assessing customer satisfaction with in-house doctors of Jiva Ayurveda (a project executed for the company)
• Predicting the potential impact of green hydrogen microgirds (A project executed for the Government of South Africa)

She is a key contributor to the in-house research platform Knowledge Tank.

She currently holds over 300 citations  from her contributions to the platform.

She has also been a guest speaker at various institutes such as JIMS (Delhi), BPIT (Delhi), and SVU (Tirupati).

I am a master's in Economics from Amity University. Having a keen interest in Econometrics and data analysis, I was a part of the Innovation Project of Daulat Ram College, Delhi University. My core expertise and interest are in environment-related issues. Apart from academics, I love music and exploring new places.

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Purdue Online Writing Lab Purdue OWL® College of Liberal Arts

Appropriate Language: Overview

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

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Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.

This handout will cover some of the major issues with appropriate language use: levels of language formality, deceitful language and euphemisms, slang and idiomatic expressions; using group-specific jargon; and biased/stereotypical language.

When writing, it is very important to use language that fits your audience and matches purpose. Inappropriate language uses can damage your credibility, undermine your argument, or alienate your audience. This handout will cover some of the major issues with appropriate language use: levels of language formality, deceitful language and euphemisms, slang and idiomatic expressions; using group-specific jargon; and biased/stereotypical language.

The following is a short overview of the different aspects of using appropriate language. Review the other sections of this handout for a more complete discussion.

• Levels of formality: Writing in a style that your audience expects and that fits your purpose is key to successful writing.
• In-Group jargon: Jargon refers to specialized language used by groups of like-minded individuals. Only use in-group jargon when you are writing for members of that group. You should never use jargon for a general audience without first explaining it.
• Slang and idiomatic expressions: Avoid using slang or idiomatic expressions in general academic writing.
• Deceitful language and euphemisms: Avoid using euphemisms (words that veil the truth, such as "collateral damage" for the unintended destruction of civilians and their property) and other deceitful language.
• Biased language: Avoid using biased language including language with a racial, ethnic, group, or gender bias or language that is stereotypical.

In this section

Mastering Scientific Language in Scientific Writing

You don’t need to master the English language as a native speaker to write excellent scientific papers. It is more important to make your research easy to grasp. Here, I’ll walk you through the three most essential scientific language hacks.

If you have followed me for a while, you’ll have noticed that I talk a lot about structure when it comes to writing a scientific paper that gets published in your target journal and cited a lot. Structure provides the skeleton of your scientific paper and is, therefore, the most crucial bit. I find the perfect structure is best achieved by using a story-telling approach . While structure is essential, knowing how to use English for scientific writing is important too.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SCIENTIFIC LANGUAGE

All too often academics and scientists think that they have to sound fancy to be taken seriously as an expert. The consequence of that is that a major part of the scientific literature is inaccessible even to other researchers in your field. If your research paper is written badly, those who read your paper will have to invest a lot of time trying to understand what you are communicating. Or they may not actually grasp the point your are making (or never read the paper at all). Hence, they won’t cite you — which means that your work won’t contribute to building scientific knowledge.

SCIENTIFIC LANGUAGE: CLEAR, SIMPLE, SHORT

Using scientific language properly when writing a paper means putting your reader first . Instead of sounding like the expert, what is most important when writing a paper is that your reader understands your scientific language easily without having to spend time and effort to decipher your writing. In other words, your scientific language should be clear and non-ambiguous.

There are two more guiding principles when it comes to scientific writing in English: Your writing should also be as short as possible and communicate your findings in the simplest way.

IT’S NOT ABOUT HAVING FLAWLESS ENGLISH FOR SCIENTIFIC WRITING

Once your scientific writing in English is clear, simple and short, having an advanced scientific writing vocabulary or mastering the English language and grammar at a native-speaker-level is not necessary. Or put differently, native English speakers don’t automatically know how to write a scientific paper .

If English is your second (or third, or fourth…) language, think twice before you pay an external editor to correct the language in your scientific paper. It may pay off a lot more important to a) tackle the structure of your writing first, and b) to implement the scientific language tips I’m sharing below.

USING ENGLISH FOR SCIENTIFIC WRITING

Here are three easy guidelines to follow to make your scientific language clear, short and simple. Just implementing these three hacks will make your scientific paper so much easier to read:

• Words to use in scientific writing: verbs instead of nouns
• What tense to use in scientific writing
• Words to avoid in scientific writing: inconsistent terminology

Let me explain.

1) WORDS TO USE IN SCIENTIFIC WRITING: VERBS INSTEAD OF NOUNS

Scientific writing in English that is very noun-heavy is really hard to read. On the contrary, sentences with powerful verbs are much quicker to grasp. Among the nouns that I notice academics use too often in their scientific papers are “agreement”, “disagreement”, “investigation”, “analysis”, “examination”, “comparison”, “increase”, “decrease” and “improvement” etc. I suggest you erase those from your scientific writing vocabulary right now!

If you use the corresponding verbs instead, your sentences will be way less convoluted, and faster to read. Let me show you an example:

• We present an analysis of the catalyst performance. Because we observed a slight improvement in activity, our results are in agreement with the literature.

is better phrased as

• We analysed the catalyst performance. Because the activity improved slightly, our results agree with the literature.

Did you notice how much easier it was to read the second version compared to the first? And that’s not all: The second example contains only two thirds of the words of the first. Thus, using verbs instead of nouns is also a great technique to cut down your word count .

2) WHAT TENSE TO USE IN SCIENTIFIC WRITING

As a graduate student, I kept being confused about what tense to use in scientific writing. I’m not surprised if you are too because so many authors of scientific papers are not using the tenses correctly. When I or our other academic writing coaches review writing for members of our online program, the Researchers’ Writing Academy, we make a note about the tense used almost every time.

I’m not talking about what tense to use in scientific writing to make sure your writing is grammatically correct but rather because the wrong tense can easily confuse a reader.

Generally, if you describe actions that took place in the past, such as the findings of past research, your own experiments and specific observations, the past tense is the correct one.

Here are some examples of sentences that should be written in past tense:

• Janssen et al. observed that….
• We measured the diameter of the nanoparticles using…
• The activity was dependent on… *

* if this is for a specific experiment

So, when should you use the present tense ? This tense is reserved for established facts, truths, generalisations and things that your scientific paper covers.

• Platinum is a transition metal commonly used as a catalyst.
• The activity depends on…**
• In this paper, we show that…

* if this is a general trend, and not only the result of a specific experiment

3) WORDS TO AVOID IN SCIENTIFIC WRITING: INCONSISTENT TERMINOLOGY

If you asked me which words to avoid in scientific writing, I’d say: synonyms! I know you may be afraid of repeating yourself risking to make your writing boring, but the truth is: Your reader will get confused if you call the same thing many different things. I promise, they won’t get bored reading your text. They are not reading your paper to get entertained but rather to understand something, so always remember rule #1 about scientific language: Be clear.

A simple intervention to make your scientific writing in English clearer is by defining a term clearly and then using that term consistently throughout your whole manuscript.

I’ll give you an example:

“Signal”, “electron count”, the invented abbreviation “EC”, and “intensity” may be used interchangeably. Instead of using all of these synonyms in different places in your manuscript, decide on one synonym and stick with it!

MASTERING SCIENTIFIC LANGUAGE – CONCLUSION

Repeat after me: Clear, simple, short — that encapsulates everything you need to know about scientific writing in English. If you feel like you’re not effective at communicating clearly and concisely, maybe are getting desk-rejected a lot, I have a free resource for you!

In this free online training, I will introduce you to my step-by-step system to write clear & concise papers for your target journals. Click the button below to watch now or save for later.

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13.1 Formatting a Research Paper

Learning objectives.

• Identify the major components of a research paper written using American Psychological Association (APA) style.
• Apply general APA style and formatting conventions in a research paper.

In this chapter, you will learn how to use APA style , the documentation and formatting style followed by the American Psychological Association, as well as MLA style , from the Modern Language Association. There are a few major formatting styles used in academic texts, including AMA, Chicago, and Turabian:

• AMA (American Medical Association) for medicine, health, and biological sciences
• APA (American Psychological Association) for education, psychology, and the social sciences
• Chicago—a common style used in everyday publications like magazines, newspapers, and books
• MLA (Modern Language Association) for English, literature, arts, and humanities
• Turabian—another common style designed for its universal application across all subjects and disciplines

While all the formatting and citation styles have their own use and applications, in this chapter we focus our attention on the two styles you are most likely to use in your academic studies: APA and MLA.

If you find that the rules of proper source documentation are difficult to keep straight, you are not alone. Writing a good research paper is, in and of itself, a major intellectual challenge. Having to follow detailed citation and formatting guidelines as well may seem like just one more task to add to an already-too-long list of requirements.

Following these guidelines, however, serves several important purposes. First, it signals to your readers that your paper should be taken seriously as a student’s contribution to a given academic or professional field; it is the literary equivalent of wearing a tailored suit to a job interview. Second, it shows that you respect other people’s work enough to give them proper credit for it. Finally, it helps your reader find additional materials if he or she wishes to learn more about your topic.

Furthermore, producing a letter-perfect APA-style paper need not be burdensome. Yes, it requires careful attention to detail. However, you can simplify the process if you keep these broad guidelines in mind:

• Work ahead whenever you can. Chapter 11 “Writing from Research: What Will I Learn?” includes tips for keeping track of your sources early in the research process, which will save time later on.
• Get it right the first time. Apply APA guidelines as you write, so you will not have much to correct during the editing stage. Again, putting in a little extra time early on can save time later.
• Use the resources available to you. In addition to the guidelines provided in this chapter, you may wish to consult the APA website at http://www.apa.org or the Purdue University Online Writing lab at http://owl.english.purdue.edu , which regularly updates its online style guidelines.

General Formatting Guidelines

This chapter provides detailed guidelines for using the citation and formatting conventions developed by the American Psychological Association, or APA. Writers in disciplines as diverse as astrophysics, biology, psychology, and education follow APA style. The major components of a paper written in APA style are listed in the following box.

These are the major components of an APA-style paper:

Body, which includes the following:

• Headings and, if necessary, subheadings to organize the content
• In-text citations of research sources
• References page

All these components must be saved in one document, not as separate documents.

The title page of your paper includes the following information:

• Title of the paper
• Author’s name
• Name of the institution with which the author is affiliated
• Header at the top of the page with the paper title (in capital letters) and the page number (If the title is lengthy, you may use a shortened form of it in the header.)

List the first three elements in the order given in the previous list, centered about one third of the way down from the top of the page. Use the headers and footers tool of your word-processing program to add the header, with the title text at the left and the page number in the upper-right corner. Your title page should look like the following example.

The next page of your paper provides an abstract , or brief summary of your findings. An abstract does not need to be provided in every paper, but an abstract should be used in papers that include a hypothesis. A good abstract is concise—about one hundred fifty to two hundred fifty words—and is written in an objective, impersonal style. Your writing voice will not be as apparent here as in the body of your paper. When writing the abstract, take a just-the-facts approach, and summarize your research question and your findings in a few sentences.

In Chapter 12 “Writing a Research Paper” , you read a paper written by a student named Jorge, who researched the effectiveness of low-carbohydrate diets. Read Jorge’s abstract. Note how it sums up the major ideas in his paper without going into excessive detail.

Write an abstract summarizing your paper. Briefly introduce the topic, state your findings, and sum up what conclusions you can draw from your research. Use the word count feature of your word-processing program to make sure your abstract does not exceed one hundred fifty words.

Depending on your field of study, you may sometimes write research papers that present extensive primary research, such as your own experiment or survey. In your abstract, summarize your research question and your findings, and briefly indicate how your study relates to prior research in the field.

Margins, Pagination, and Headings

APA style requirements also address specific formatting concerns, such as margins, pagination, and heading styles, within the body of the paper. Review the following APA guidelines.

Use these general guidelines to format the paper:

• Set the top, bottom, and side margins of your paper at 1 inch.
• Use double-spaced text throughout your paper.
• Use a standard font, such as Times New Roman or Arial, in a legible size (10- to 12-point).
• Use continuous pagination throughout the paper, including the title page and the references section. Page numbers appear flush right within your header.
• Section headings and subsection headings within the body of your paper use different types of formatting depending on the level of information you are presenting. Additional details from Jorge’s paper are provided.

Begin formatting the final draft of your paper according to APA guidelines. You may work with an existing document or set up a new document if you choose. Include the following:

• Your title page
• The abstract you created in Note 13.8 “Exercise 1”
• Correct headers and page numbers for your title page and abstract

APA style uses section headings to organize information, making it easy for the reader to follow the writer’s train of thought and to know immediately what major topics are covered. Depending on the length and complexity of the paper, its major sections may also be divided into subsections, sub-subsections, and so on. These smaller sections, in turn, use different heading styles to indicate different levels of information. In essence, you are using headings to create a hierarchy of information.

The following heading styles used in APA formatting are listed in order of greatest to least importance:

• Section headings use centered, boldface type. Headings use title case, with important words in the heading capitalized.
• Subsection headings use left-aligned, boldface type. Headings use title case.
• The third level uses left-aligned, indented, boldface type. Headings use a capital letter only for the first word, and they end in a period.
• The fourth level follows the same style used for the previous level, but the headings are boldfaced and italicized.
• The fifth level follows the same style used for the previous level, but the headings are italicized and not boldfaced.

Visually, the hierarchy of information is organized as indicated in Table 13.1 “Section Headings” .

Table 13.1 Section Headings

A college research paper may not use all the heading levels shown in Table 13.1 “Section Headings” , but you are likely to encounter them in academic journal articles that use APA style. For a brief paper, you may find that level 1 headings suffice. Longer or more complex papers may need level 2 headings or other lower-level headings to organize information clearly. Use your outline to craft your major section headings and determine whether any subtopics are substantial enough to require additional levels of headings.

Working with the document you developed in Note 13.11 “Exercise 2” , begin setting up the heading structure of the final draft of your research paper according to APA guidelines. Include your title and at least two to three major section headings, and follow the formatting guidelines provided above. If your major sections should be broken into subsections, add those headings as well. Use your outline to help you.

Because Jorge used only level 1 headings, his Exercise 3 would look like the following:

Citation Guidelines

In-text citations.

Throughout the body of your paper, include a citation whenever you quote or paraphrase material from your research sources. As you learned in Chapter 11 “Writing from Research: What Will I Learn?” , the purpose of citations is twofold: to give credit to others for their ideas and to allow your reader to follow up and learn more about the topic if desired. Your in-text citations provide basic information about your source; each source you cite will have a longer entry in the references section that provides more detailed information.

In-text citations must provide the name of the author or authors and the year the source was published. (When a given source does not list an individual author, you may provide the source title or the name of the organization that published the material instead.) When directly quoting a source, it is also required that you include the page number where the quote appears in your citation.

This information may be included within the sentence or in a parenthetical reference at the end of the sentence, as in these examples.

Epstein (2010) points out that “junk food cannot be considered addictive in the same way that we think of psychoactive drugs as addictive” (p. 137).

Here, the writer names the source author when introducing the quote and provides the publication date in parentheses after the author’s name. The page number appears in parentheses after the closing quotation marks and before the period that ends the sentence.

Addiction researchers caution that “junk food cannot be considered addictive in the same way that we think of psychoactive drugs as addictive” (Epstein, 2010, p. 137).

Here, the writer provides a parenthetical citation at the end of the sentence that includes the author’s name, the year of publication, and the page number separated by commas. Again, the parenthetical citation is placed after the closing quotation marks and before the period at the end of the sentence.

As noted in the book Junk Food, Junk Science (Epstein, 2010, p. 137), “junk food cannot be considered addictive in the same way that we think of psychoactive drugs as addictive.”

Here, the writer chose to mention the source title in the sentence (an optional piece of information to include) and followed the title with a parenthetical citation. Note that the parenthetical citation is placed before the comma that signals the end of the introductory phrase.

David Epstein’s book Junk Food, Junk Science (2010) pointed out that “junk food cannot be considered addictive in the same way that we think of psychoactive drugs as addictive” (p. 137).

Another variation is to introduce the author and the source title in your sentence and include the publication date and page number in parentheses within the sentence or at the end of the sentence. As long as you have included the essential information, you can choose the option that works best for that particular sentence and source.

Citing a book with a single author is usually a straightforward task. Of course, your research may require that you cite many other types of sources, such as books or articles with more than one author or sources with no individual author listed. You may also need to cite sources available in both print and online and nonprint sources, such as websites and personal interviews. Chapter 13 “APA and MLA Documentation and Formatting” , Section 13.2 “Citing and Referencing Techniques” and Section 13.3 “Creating a References Section” provide extensive guidelines for citing a variety of source types.

Writing at Work

APA is just one of several different styles with its own guidelines for documentation, formatting, and language usage. Depending on your field of interest, you may be exposed to additional styles, such as the following:

• MLA style. Determined by the Modern Languages Association and used for papers in literature, languages, and other disciplines in the humanities.
• Chicago style. Outlined in the Chicago Manual of Style and sometimes used for papers in the humanities and the sciences; many professional organizations use this style for publications as well.
• Associated Press (AP) style. Used by professional journalists.

References List

The brief citations included in the body of your paper correspond to the more detailed citations provided at the end of the paper in the references section. In-text citations provide basic information—the author’s name, the publication date, and the page number if necessary—while the references section provides more extensive bibliographical information. Again, this information allows your reader to follow up on the sources you cited and do additional reading about the topic if desired.

The specific format of entries in the list of references varies slightly for different source types, but the entries generally include the following information:

• The name(s) of the author(s) or institution that wrote the source
• The year of publication and, where applicable, the exact date of publication
• The full title of the source
• For books, the city of publication
• For articles or essays, the name of the periodical or book in which the article or essay appears
• For magazine and journal articles, the volume number, issue number, and pages where the article appears
• For sources on the web, the URL where the source is located

The references page is double spaced and lists entries in alphabetical order by the author’s last name. If an entry continues for more than one line, the second line and each subsequent line are indented five spaces. Review the following example. ( Chapter 13 “APA and MLA Documentation and Formatting” , Section 13.3 “Creating a References Section” provides extensive guidelines for formatting reference entries for different types of sources.)

In APA style, book and article titles are formatted in sentence case, not title case. Sentence case means that only the first word is capitalized, along with any proper nouns.

Key Takeaways

• Following proper citation and formatting guidelines helps writers ensure that their work will be taken seriously, give proper credit to other authors for their work, and provide valuable information to readers.
• Working ahead and taking care to cite sources correctly the first time are ways writers can save time during the editing stage of writing a research paper.
• APA papers usually include an abstract that concisely summarizes the paper.
• APA papers use a specific headings structure to provide a clear hierarchy of information.
• In APA papers, in-text citations usually include the name(s) of the author(s) and the year of publication.
• In-text citations correspond to entries in the references section, which provide detailed bibliographical information about a source.

Writing for Success Copyright © 2015 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Home » Research Paper – Structure, Examples and Writing Guide

Research Paper – Structure, Examples and Writing Guide

Table of Contents

Research Paper

Definition:

Research Paper is a written document that presents the author’s original research, analysis, and interpretation of a specific topic or issue.

It is typically based on Empirical Evidence, and may involve qualitative or quantitative research methods, or a combination of both. The purpose of a research paper is to contribute new knowledge or insights to a particular field of study, and to demonstrate the author’s understanding of the existing literature and theories related to the topic.

Structure of Research Paper

The structure of a research paper typically follows a standard format, consisting of several sections that convey specific information about the research study. The following is a detailed explanation of the structure of a research paper:

The title page contains the title of the paper, the name(s) of the author(s), and the affiliation(s) of the author(s). It also includes the date of submission and possibly, the name of the journal or conference where the paper is to be published.

The abstract is a brief summary of the research paper, typically ranging from 100 to 250 words. It should include the research question, the methods used, the key findings, and the implications of the results. The abstract should be written in a concise and clear manner to allow readers to quickly grasp the essence of the research.

Introduction

The introduction section of a research paper provides background information about the research problem, the research question, and the research objectives. It also outlines the significance of the research, the research gap that it aims to fill, and the approach taken to address the research question. Finally, the introduction section ends with a clear statement of the research hypothesis or research question.

Literature Review

The literature review section of a research paper provides an overview of the existing literature on the topic of study. It includes a critical analysis and synthesis of the literature, highlighting the key concepts, themes, and debates. The literature review should also demonstrate the research gap and how the current study seeks to address it.

The methods section of a research paper describes the research design, the sample selection, the data collection and analysis procedures, and the statistical methods used to analyze the data. This section should provide sufficient detail for other researchers to replicate the study.

The results section presents the findings of the research, using tables, graphs, and figures to illustrate the data. The findings should be presented in a clear and concise manner, with reference to the research question and hypothesis.

The discussion section of a research paper interprets the findings and discusses their implications for the research question, the literature review, and the field of study. It should also address the limitations of the study and suggest future research directions.

The conclusion section summarizes the main findings of the study, restates the research question and hypothesis, and provides a final reflection on the significance of the research.

The references section provides a list of all the sources cited in the paper, following a specific citation style such as APA, MLA or Chicago.

How to Write Research Paper

You can write Research Paper by the following guide:

• Choose a Topic: The first step is to select a topic that interests you and is relevant to your field of study. Brainstorm ideas and narrow down to a research question that is specific and researchable.
• Conduct a Literature Review: The literature review helps you identify the gap in the existing research and provides a basis for your research question. It also helps you to develop a theoretical framework and research hypothesis.
• Develop a Thesis Statement : The thesis statement is the main argument of your research paper. It should be clear, concise and specific to your research question.
• Plan your Research: Develop a research plan that outlines the methods, data sources, and data analysis procedures. This will help you to collect and analyze data effectively.
• Collect and Analyze Data: Collect data using various methods such as surveys, interviews, observations, or experiments. Analyze data using statistical tools or other qualitative methods.
• Organize your Paper : Organize your paper into sections such as Introduction, Literature Review, Methods, Results, Discussion, and Conclusion. Ensure that each section is coherent and follows a logical flow.
• Write your Paper : Start by writing the introduction, followed by the literature review, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion. Ensure that your writing is clear, concise, and follows the required formatting and citation styles.
• Edit and Proofread your Paper: Review your paper for grammar and spelling errors, and ensure that it is well-structured and easy to read. Ask someone else to review your paper to get feedback and suggestions for improvement.
• Cite your Sources: Ensure that you properly cite all sources used in your research paper. This is essential for giving credit to the original authors and avoiding plagiarism.

Research Paper Example

Note : The below example research paper is for illustrative purposes only and is not an actual research paper. Actual research papers may have different structures, contents, and formats depending on the field of study, research question, data collection and analysis methods, and other factors. Students should always consult with their professors or supervisors for specific guidelines and expectations for their research papers.

Research Paper Example sample for Students:

Title: The Impact of Social Media on Mental Health among Young Adults

Abstract: This study aims to investigate the impact of social media use on the mental health of young adults. A literature review was conducted to examine the existing research on the topic. A survey was then administered to 200 university students to collect data on their social media use, mental health status, and perceived impact of social media on their mental health. The results showed that social media use is positively associated with depression, anxiety, and stress. The study also found that social comparison, cyberbullying, and FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) are significant predictors of mental health problems among young adults.

Introduction: Social media has become an integral part of modern life, particularly among young adults. While social media has many benefits, including increased communication and social connectivity, it has also been associated with negative outcomes, such as addiction, cyberbullying, and mental health problems. This study aims to investigate the impact of social media use on the mental health of young adults.

Literature Review: The literature review highlights the existing research on the impact of social media use on mental health. The review shows that social media use is associated with depression, anxiety, stress, and other mental health problems. The review also identifies the factors that contribute to the negative impact of social media, including social comparison, cyberbullying, and FOMO.

Methods : A survey was administered to 200 university students to collect data on their social media use, mental health status, and perceived impact of social media on their mental health. The survey included questions on social media use, mental health status (measured using the DASS-21), and perceived impact of social media on their mental health. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and regression analysis.

Results : The results showed that social media use is positively associated with depression, anxiety, and stress. The study also found that social comparison, cyberbullying, and FOMO are significant predictors of mental health problems among young adults.

Discussion : The study’s findings suggest that social media use has a negative impact on the mental health of young adults. The study highlights the need for interventions that address the factors contributing to the negative impact of social media, such as social comparison, cyberbullying, and FOMO.

Conclusion : In conclusion, social media use has a significant impact on the mental health of young adults. The study’s findings underscore the need for interventions that promote healthy social media use and address the negative outcomes associated with social media use. Future research can explore the effectiveness of interventions aimed at reducing the negative impact of social media on mental health. Additionally, longitudinal studies can investigate the long-term effects of social media use on mental health.

Limitations : The study has some limitations, including the use of self-report measures and a cross-sectional design. The use of self-report measures may result in biased responses, and a cross-sectional design limits the ability to establish causality.

Implications: The study’s findings have implications for mental health professionals, educators, and policymakers. Mental health professionals can use the findings to develop interventions that address the negative impact of social media use on mental health. Educators can incorporate social media literacy into their curriculum to promote healthy social media use among young adults. Policymakers can use the findings to develop policies that protect young adults from the negative outcomes associated with social media use.

References :

• Twenge, J. M., & Campbell, W. K. (2019). Associations between screen time and lower psychological well-being among children and adolescents: Evidence from a population-based study. Preventive medicine reports, 15, 100918.
• Primack, B. A., Shensa, A., Escobar-Viera, C. G., Barrett, E. L., Sidani, J. E., Colditz, J. B., … & James, A. E. (2017). Use of multiple social media platforms and symptoms of depression and anxiety: A nationally-representative study among US young adults. Computers in Human Behavior, 69, 1-9.
• Van der Meer, T. G., & Verhoeven, J. W. (2017). Social media and its impact on academic performance of students. Journal of Information Technology Education: Research, 16, 383-398.

Appendix : The survey used in this study is provided below.

Social Media and Mental Health Survey

• How often do you use social media per day?
• Less than 30 minutes
• 30 minutes to 1 hour
• 1 to 2 hours
• 2 to 4 hours
• More than 4 hours
• Which social media platforms do you use?
• Others (Please specify)
• How often do you experience the following on social media?
• Social comparison (comparing yourself to others)
• Cyberbullying
• Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)
• Have you ever experienced any of the following mental health problems in the past month?
• Do you think social media use has a positive or negative impact on your mental health?
• Very positive
• Somewhat positive
• Somewhat negative
• Very negative
• In your opinion, which factors contribute to the negative impact of social media on mental health?
• Social comparison
• In your opinion, what interventions could be effective in reducing the negative impact of social media on mental health?
• Education on healthy social media use
• Counseling for mental health problems caused by social media
• Social media detox programs
• Regulation of social media use

Thank you for your participation!

Applications of Research Paper

Research papers have several applications in various fields, including:

• Advancing knowledge: Research papers contribute to the advancement of knowledge by generating new insights, theories, and findings that can inform future research and practice. They help to answer important questions, clarify existing knowledge, and identify areas that require further investigation.
• Informing policy: Research papers can inform policy decisions by providing evidence-based recommendations for policymakers. They can help to identify gaps in current policies, evaluate the effectiveness of interventions, and inform the development of new policies and regulations.
• Improving practice: Research papers can improve practice by providing evidence-based guidance for professionals in various fields, including medicine, education, business, and psychology. They can inform the development of best practices, guidelines, and standards of care that can improve outcomes for individuals and organizations.
• Educating students : Research papers are often used as teaching tools in universities and colleges to educate students about research methods, data analysis, and academic writing. They help students to develop critical thinking skills, research skills, and communication skills that are essential for success in many careers.
• Fostering collaboration: Research papers can foster collaboration among researchers, practitioners, and policymakers by providing a platform for sharing knowledge and ideas. They can facilitate interdisciplinary collaborations and partnerships that can lead to innovative solutions to complex problems.

When to Write Research Paper

Research papers are typically written when a person has completed a research project or when they have conducted a study and have obtained data or findings that they want to share with the academic or professional community. Research papers are usually written in academic settings, such as universities, but they can also be written in professional settings, such as research organizations, government agencies, or private companies.

Here are some common situations where a person might need to write a research paper:

• For academic purposes: Students in universities and colleges are often required to write research papers as part of their coursework, particularly in the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities. Writing research papers helps students to develop research skills, critical thinking skills, and academic writing skills.
• For publication: Researchers often write research papers to publish their findings in academic journals or to present their work at academic conferences. Publishing research papers is an important way to disseminate research findings to the academic community and to establish oneself as an expert in a particular field.
• To inform policy or practice : Researchers may write research papers to inform policy decisions or to improve practice in various fields. Research findings can be used to inform the development of policies, guidelines, and best practices that can improve outcomes for individuals and organizations.
• To share new insights or ideas: Researchers may write research papers to share new insights or ideas with the academic or professional community. They may present new theories, propose new research methods, or challenge existing paradigms in their field.

Purpose of Research Paper

The purpose of a research paper is to present the results of a study or investigation in a clear, concise, and structured manner. Research papers are written to communicate new knowledge, ideas, or findings to a specific audience, such as researchers, scholars, practitioners, or policymakers. The primary purposes of a research paper are:

• To contribute to the body of knowledge : Research papers aim to add new knowledge or insights to a particular field or discipline. They do this by reporting the results of empirical studies, reviewing and synthesizing existing literature, proposing new theories, or providing new perspectives on a topic.
• To inform or persuade: Research papers are written to inform or persuade the reader about a particular issue, topic, or phenomenon. They present evidence and arguments to support their claims and seek to persuade the reader of the validity of their findings or recommendations.
• To advance the field: Research papers seek to advance the field or discipline by identifying gaps in knowledge, proposing new research questions or approaches, or challenging existing assumptions or paradigms. They aim to contribute to ongoing debates and discussions within a field and to stimulate further research and inquiry.
• To demonstrate research skills: Research papers demonstrate the author’s research skills, including their ability to design and conduct a study, collect and analyze data, and interpret and communicate findings. They also demonstrate the author’s ability to critically evaluate existing literature, synthesize information from multiple sources, and write in a clear and structured manner.

Characteristics of Research Paper

Research papers have several characteristics that distinguish them from other forms of academic or professional writing. Here are some common characteristics of research papers:

• Evidence-based: Research papers are based on empirical evidence, which is collected through rigorous research methods such as experiments, surveys, observations, or interviews. They rely on objective data and facts to support their claims and conclusions.
• Structured and organized: Research papers have a clear and logical structure, with sections such as introduction, literature review, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion. They are organized in a way that helps the reader to follow the argument and understand the findings.
• Formal and objective: Research papers are written in a formal and objective tone, with an emphasis on clarity, precision, and accuracy. They avoid subjective language or personal opinions and instead rely on objective data and analysis to support their arguments.
• Citations and references: Research papers include citations and references to acknowledge the sources of information and ideas used in the paper. They use a specific citation style, such as APA, MLA, or Chicago, to ensure consistency and accuracy.
• Peer-reviewed: Research papers are often peer-reviewed, which means they are evaluated by other experts in the field before they are published. Peer-review ensures that the research is of high quality, meets ethical standards, and contributes to the advancement of knowledge in the field.
• Objective and unbiased: Research papers strive to be objective and unbiased in their presentation of the findings. They avoid personal biases or preconceptions and instead rely on the data and analysis to draw conclusions.

Advantages of Research Paper

Research papers have many advantages, both for the individual researcher and for the broader academic and professional community. Here are some advantages of research papers:

• Contribution to knowledge: Research papers contribute to the body of knowledge in a particular field or discipline. They add new information, insights, and perspectives to existing literature and help advance the understanding of a particular phenomenon or issue.
• Opportunity for intellectual growth: Research papers provide an opportunity for intellectual growth for the researcher. They require critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity, which can help develop the researcher’s skills and knowledge.
• Career advancement: Research papers can help advance the researcher’s career by demonstrating their expertise and contributions to the field. They can also lead to new research opportunities, collaborations, and funding.
• Academic recognition: Research papers can lead to academic recognition in the form of awards, grants, or invitations to speak at conferences or events. They can also contribute to the researcher’s reputation and standing in the field.
• Impact on policy and practice: Research papers can have a significant impact on policy and practice. They can inform policy decisions, guide practice, and lead to changes in laws, regulations, or procedures.
• Advancement of society: Research papers can contribute to the advancement of society by addressing important issues, identifying solutions to problems, and promoting social justice and equality.

Limitations of Research Paper

Research papers also have some limitations that should be considered when interpreting their findings or implications. Here are some common limitations of research papers:

• Limited generalizability: Research findings may not be generalizable to other populations, settings, or contexts. Studies often use specific samples or conditions that may not reflect the broader population or real-world situations.
• Potential for bias : Research papers may be biased due to factors such as sample selection, measurement errors, or researcher biases. It is important to evaluate the quality of the research design and methods used to ensure that the findings are valid and reliable.
• Ethical concerns: Research papers may raise ethical concerns, such as the use of vulnerable populations or invasive procedures. Researchers must adhere to ethical guidelines and obtain informed consent from participants to ensure that the research is conducted in a responsible and respectful manner.
• Limitations of methodology: Research papers may be limited by the methodology used to collect and analyze data. For example, certain research methods may not capture the complexity or nuance of a particular phenomenon, or may not be appropriate for certain research questions.
• Publication bias: Research papers may be subject to publication bias, where positive or significant findings are more likely to be published than negative or non-significant findings. This can skew the overall findings of a particular area of research.
• Time and resource constraints: Research papers may be limited by time and resource constraints, which can affect the quality and scope of the research. Researchers may not have access to certain data or resources, or may be unable to conduct long-term studies due to practical limitations.

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Some Guidelines for Writing Linguistics Papers

By Fritz Newmeyer

1.         STRIVE FOR CLARITY .  Be clear!  A technical linguistics paper is not a mystery story -- there should never be any surprises. Say what your conclusion is going to be at the beginning of the paper with a few words on how you plan to get to the conclusion.  A good typical opening for a paper is something like:

In this paper, I will argue that a voiced segment must be bound in its governing category. This conclusion challenges previous work by Kenstowicz (1983) and Postal (1987), who maintain that such segments are invisible to all syntactic constraints.  My argument will take the following form. In section 2, I will show that [d] and [o] are 'alpha-emitters', and thus free in COMP. In section 3, I will establish that being free in COMP entails the property of counterjunctive trijacency (CT). Section 4, shows how, given the natural assumption that CT is sigma-sensitive, the effect of being subject to CT and that of being bound in one's governing category are notational variants. The final section, section 5, generalizes [d] and [o] to all voiced segments and speculates on the implications of the general findings in this paper for Gricean implicature.

Summarize in an analogous fashion at the end.  In fact, the first paragraph of a paper and the last can be virtually identical. Each section should be like a mini-paper in itself, previewing what will be said and summarizing at the end.

Your paper should be peppered with phrases like I will now argue..., As we have seen... , etc.  Anything to baby the reader is fine!

Almost all papers refer to the work of others, either to adopt or to challenge some principle proposed elsewhere. That's fine, of course, but it is absolutely essential that the reader understand whether a particular point is your own contribution or whether it is that of the author being cited. It is surprising how easy it is to confuse the reader, if you present someone else's idea in one paragraph and discuss the idea in the next, without saying at the beginning of the second paragraph if you are continuing to present the other author's ideas or are beginning to challenge them.

Avoid using deictic this as in all-too-common passages like This suggests that we must abandon the UCP. Invariably there is more than one potential antecedent for this . Write instead: The failure of coreference to hold between the subject and the object trace in sentence (89) suggests that we must abandon the UCP.

2.      EXAMPLES. The reader should never be in doubt as to the relevance of a particular example and should know why it is being given before  reading it. In other words, as the reader encounters an example or set of examples, they should already know what to be looking for. They shouldn't have to wait until after reading the examples to find out why they are there.

It should be clear when you give an example whether you thought of the example yourself or if you are citing somebody else's example.

Never break up a sentence of text with an example. Examples should follow a full sentence of text, which should end in a colon.

An example in the text itself should be in italics (or underlined) followed by the gloss, if necessary, in quotation marks. For example:  The German word Buch 'book' is neuter.

NONENGLISH EXAMPLES.  Examples from other languages should consist of (1) The sentence itself; (2) A word-for-word or morpheme-for-morpheme translation, containing the relevant grammatical information; (3) The actual translation:

3.      IN-TEXT CITATIONS. Use the author-date format: Chomsky (1981) and Lakoff (1983) agree that language exists.   Use small letters after the date if there is more than one reference per year for any author, as in Chomsky (1963a) .

If you are giving a direct quotation, you must use quotation marks, and put the author, date, and page number after the quotation. It’s the law! Also, it's not enough to change a word here or there in a quotation and decide that you now don't need to use quotation marks. In fact, you still do. But there is very rarely any reason to put a direct quote in a paper. It is always much better to paraphrase the material that you want to cite in your own words. Even so, you still have to give a citation to the author you are paraphrasing.

4.      FOOTNOTES .   Footnotes should always be contentful. Something like See Selkirk (1980) belongs in the main text, not in a footnote. Footnotes are normally reserved for little bits of extra clarification or material for further thought that would be digressions if they were put in the main text.

The first footnote is often an acknowledgement. By tradition, term papers do not have acknowledgements, MA theses sometimes do, while Ph D dissertations, articles, and books invariably do. However, if you rely heavily on an individual for data , even in a term paper, there should be an acknowledgement to that effect.

5.      REFERENCES. There is no single agreed upon format for references in the bibliography -- just copy a format from a journal article if you are unsure. But make sure that you include page numbers for articles and publisher and city for books.

After you have finished the paper, make sure that every paper or book that you cited in the main text has a reference in the reference list.

6 .        PERSON, NUMBER, AND VOICE .  It is best to write in the first person singular:  I will argue that... .  Personally, I find the first person plural very pompous sounding:  (e.g. We will argue that... ).

Above all, avoid the agentless passive construction. Never use phraseology like  It has been argued that ... You would be amazed how often it is really not clear who has done the arguing.

7 .        THE ONLY "PROOFS" ARE IN MATHEMATICAL LINGUISTICS. You should avoid using the word prove as in I will prove in this paper that tense has its own maximal projection. Proofs are attributes of deductive systems, not empirical science.  It is much better to use instead expressions such as attempt to establish , argue convincingly , suggest , and so on.

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Using the active and passive voice in research writing

Grammar & Language

Clarinda Cerejo

The active voice refers to a sentence format that emphasizes the doer of an action. For example, in the sentence “The mice inhaled the tobacco-infused aerosol,” the doer, i.e., “the mice” seem important. On the other hand, in the passive voice, the action being performed is emphasized, and the doer may be omitted, e.g., “The tobacco-infused aerosol was inhaled (by the mice).” In this construction, “by the mice” can be omitted, which means that the reader already knows or does not need to know who the doer is; only the action is important.

The passive voice lends an impersonal tone, which is perceived to be formal, but can make the text more wordy and difficult to understand, especially when used in long sentences. Until recently, this tone was considered favorable for scientific writing and authors were advised to strictly avoid using the active voice, especially the use of “I” and “we” in their academic research papers. Compare “In this study, we investigated the effect of drug X on the serum levels of phosphorus under various conditions” with “In this study, the effect of drug X on the serum levels of phosphorus was investigated under various conditions.”

However, nowadays, many authorities are going against this traditional notion and encouraging the use of the active voice, with the view that academic papers should be easy to read and understand. In fact, multidisciplinary SCI-indexed journals like Nature  and specialist journals like the American Journal of Botany , in their instructions for authors, state that the active voice is preferred. This is why you would now find the usage “In this study, we investigated…” very common.

So which should you use? The answer is a combination of both.

The active voice is especially useful in the introduction and discussion sections of your manuscript, where you discuss previous research and then introduce your own. For example, consider the following sentences: “Previous studies have established that drug X increases the serum levels of calcium in women with osteoporosis. In this study, we investigated the effects of drug X on the serum levels of phosphorus in post-menopausal women.” Here, using the active voice in the second sentence helps the reader make a clear mental transition from previous studies to the present study .

On the other hand, the passive voice is useful in the Methods section, where the steps taken are more important than the doer. For example, in a surgery document, a reader would prefer “A catheter was inserted for post-operative bladder irrigation” over “We inserted a catheter for post-operative bladder irrigation.”

Your guiding principle should be clarity: Think about what information the target reader is looking for, and choose the active voice or the passive voice, whichever will make the text most clear and comprehensible. If you write keeping this in mind, no journal reviewer will need to give you feedback about the active and passive voice.

Can you think of some other examples where either one voice—active or passive—clearly seems better?

For further reading, you could refer to this helpful article:  Is it acceptable to use first person pronouns in scientific writing?

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Published on: Oct 16, 2013

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Why are research papers written in language that's difficult for undergraduate students?

As an undergraduate student, I find it hard to understand research papers on any particular subject.

Why don't researchers use simple language for their reports, so that everyone would understand?

Update: I will leave this post as a general discussion on this topic. Feel free to edit question.

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• 21 Strongly related question: Why do researchers sometimes use extremely complicated English sentences to convey their meaning? –  Nobody Commented May 22, 2018 at 12:08
• 6 Papers are not necessarily written for undergraduate students to understand. They are usually for other researchers in the field. Filling in all the gaps that would allow undergraduates to understand everything would result in a textbook (which is probably most of what you are reading these days...). –  Jared Becksfort Commented May 25, 2018 at 14:55
• 5 @ZulfidinKhodzhaev Well, that's totally excusable. They're just showing the calculation while skipping trivial steps, i.e. the steps that every physicist knows how to fill in themselves. Because you're still a student, you don't know the trivial steps yet, but that's not their fault. If they had as much detail as an intro QM class the paper would be 200 pages. –  knzhou Commented May 26, 2018 at 8:23
• 2 What is the audience for a research paper? –  Bob Jarvis - Слава Україні Commented May 26, 2018 at 23:02
• 2 @BobJarvis the primary audience of a research paper is the researchers in the same subfield/community, who would be expected to have read (or at least be aware of) most of existing knowledge that the paper is builds upon; the main purpose of an original research paper is to disseminate the new knowledge that wasn't known to anyone and wasn't ever published before. –  Peteris Commented May 28, 2018 at 11:01

15 Answers 15

In short, because it is difficult to express something concisely , and precisely in language that any undergraduate can understand.

Conciseness is required not just because without it every report would be inconveniently long to write and to read, but because it would be harder to understand. It would be harder to understand because the jargon neatly encapsulates a bundle of concepts (e.g. its definition and related properties) into a single concept. And we can only be thinking about so many concepts at a time.

Consider the statement about the Stone–Weierstrass theorem:

A mathematician might say:

Polynomial functions are dense in C[a,b] ⊂ (ℝ→ℝ)

To expand out the math, so that one does not have to know the notations on gets:

Polynomial functions are dense in the space of continuous real-valued functions defined on a closed interval.

But still perhaps the word dense is beyond the understanding of an undergrad.

So let's expand it to not use that:

For every continuous real-valued function defined an interval; then for any positive real constant one might care to define, a polynomial can be found such that for every point on that interval the absolute difference between the value of that polynomial and the value of the real function at the point is smaller than the constant.

So that is how much most space it took and how many more ideas one has to keep track of for that fairly simple use of jargon. When thinking about such a problem rarely is the mathematician thinking about what is going on with the distance of points in a hypothetical polynomial. They are just thinking "it is dense".

Now imagine expanding all the terms in the generalized version of the above:

Stone–Weierstrass Theorem (real numbers). Suppose X is a compact Hausdorff space and A is a subalgebra of C(X, R) which contains a non-zero constant function. Then A is dense in C(X, R) if and only if it separates points.

(This last is a direct quote from the Wikipedia page on the Stone–Weierstrass theorem , the preceding quotes are not, though are to some extent paraphrases.)

Then to go the other point on preciseness , There is a really high chance someone is going to comment on this answer saying that actually my statement is not quite correct, that I've not fully captured the definitions in my explanation

While, yes, every paper could repeat some introductory information, then that would inconvenience any reader who is looking to find the core idea, since it would be drowned in a sea of background material.

And you might say that "this answer is hard to understand, in the expanded form, you did a poor job at making it understandable to an undergraduate." , and I'ld say "Fair enough; I'm not great at making things easily understandable."

And that statement holds for most other researchers too. Not what most are good at -- it is why there are specialists in scientific communication.

• 3 Your expansion of the definition of "dense" brings up a different problem. I didn't know the definition before, but it took me several minutes to realize that it boils down to "A polynomial can approximate any continuous function on a closed interval arbitrarily well", which, I think, is far more accessible. –  LLlAMnYP Commented May 25, 2018 at 12:09
• 8 @LLIAMnYP that is more accessible indeed, but it is less precise . (Honestly it is pretty good; the fact that I didn't use it, in part demonstrates my final point: Like most researcher's I'm not great at making things easily understandable.") –  Frames Catherine White Commented May 25, 2018 at 12:29
• 5 @LLlAMnYP Note in particular that there are many reasonable topologies one can put on a set of functions, which each yield different notions of what "approximate" means. –  Noah Schweber Commented May 25, 2018 at 22:57
• 2 @LLlAMnYP: Let me also, in addition to the others, that if every time someone writes "D is dense in X" they should replace it by "we can approximate every point in X by some collection of points from D ordered in some particular way" (read: every point in X is a limit of a net from D), that would be a serious hindrance in both reading and writing. This is why we have a word for "phone" or a word for "sofa", to convey information in a short and precise manner. –  Ink blot Commented May 26, 2018 at 12:31
• 2 @inkblot very true. We absolutely should use correct words like "X is dense" and "Y is a sofa" and "Z is a phone" and not, god forbid, a "communications device", just because that sounds more "academic". –  LLlAMnYP Commented May 27, 2018 at 14:54

The intended audience of a research paper is not 'everyone'; it is other researchers in the same field.

As a comparison, consider things like car manuals, or legal documents. It would be possible to write these in more accessible language, but that would detract from the primary purpose of the document.

• 26 @ZulfidinKhodzhaev That's why the "crossbred" scienists are scarce and wanted. They are capable of reading and thinking in multiple universes. –  Crowley Commented May 22, 2018 at 13:56
• 60 Put another way, the purpose of a research paper is to report , not to educate . You don't teach your fellow researchers, you simply tell them what you discovered in a language that they can readily understand. –  J.R. Commented May 22, 2018 at 16:17
• 3 @J.R. I thought the primary purpose of a research paper was either to fulfill a contractual obligation of a grant or to advertise for a new grant. Reporting and educating is discouraged. –  emory Commented May 23, 2018 at 15:37
• 13 "Car manuals" seems like a horrible example as they should be targeting the general population, no? Nearly every family owns at least one car and thus has a manual for its basic care. –  jpmc26 Commented May 23, 2018 at 18:47
• 5 @emory I can't tell whether you are being serious. –  Jessica B Commented May 23, 2018 at 21:19

In short, because undergraduate students are not the target audience of research papers' authors.

• 2 This only partially answers the question. Sure, they are not the target audience, but it's still extra effort to use difficult words where easy ones would do. This is expected of us (I'm doing a master's right now and a paper written like a blog post... well, nobody ever dared to try) but it also purposefully keeps less well educated people out. This might reduce the noise (if stupid people can't keep up with your conversation, they can't join it) but is that truly the goal? Are we all agreed on that we should keep a large group out, or is it just a practice that stuck? –  Luc Commented May 23, 2018 at 18:15
• 11 @Luc 'but it's still extra effort to use difficult words where easy ones would do'; errr.... no. The 'difficult' words in this context are the ones you normally use. –  Jessica B Commented May 23, 2018 at 21:21
• @JessicaB After how much practice in writing papers? Would you use those when you didn't have experience in writing papers, but you did have topical knowledge? I'm currently doing a master's, but I got here via an odd route and while I have had subject knowledge for years, I found papers on the subject quite hard to read (understandable, but it just takes forever to parse it all). It has gotten better, but both reading and writing them takes practice. It's a different kind of English, and I just don't think it's always required to get the point across concisely. –  Luc Commented May 23, 2018 at 21:30
• 2 @Luc: I got quite the opposite advise when writing one of my first papers: my supervisor told me e.g. to replace a) "advanced" grammar (genitives with 's [which are easy and natural for me as they are similar to what my native language does]) by a more plain construction (of) and b) avoid the use of synonyms in favor of one and the same term. The reasoning was to make reading easier for non-native speakers who possibly have never met the concept of cases and may need to look up terms. –  cbeleites Commented May 24, 2018 at 10:56
• 4 @Luc Yes, I would use the same language for the subject as when writing papers. Mathematicians spend a lot of time saying very very carefully what they mean. –  Jessica B Commented May 24, 2018 at 12:33

There are different possible reasons for a paper being "hard to understand".

One of the reasons was already elaborated in the other answers. It basically boils down to the presuppositions and assumptions that are made in technical terms. The writers expect the readers to have some familiarity with the subject. Special jargon or notations are used simply because they allow a certain brevity and precision. When a term has a specific meaning, the meaning is assumed to be known, and in doubt, can be looked up elsewhere. The details of this problem may also depend on the subject: In a mathematical paper, the main hurdle may be understanding certain notations. In a social sciences paper, the main difficulty may be in understanding the precise meaning of certain terms.

But there is another reason. It was also mentioned in the comments, and discussed in other questions . The reason is that the text itself may simply be written in a form that is hard to understand.

Going one level deeper, the obvious next question is: Why is the text written in this form?

I think, broadly speaking, there are two possible answers to this:

• The text is deliberately written in an elaborated language to generate a linguistically challenging experience for the addressee (meaning: "The author uses complicated words to make it difficult to understand")
• The author is not able to write it in a simpler form. There is a famous quote: "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." (attributed in different forms to different people). Writing an easily comprehensible text is difficult (particularly when the author is not a native English speaker). But improving the text by organizing and rephrasing it so that it concisely and precisely conveys the intended message is time consuming - and people are often (not willing or) not able to invest the required amount of time.

Interestingly, English is the only language for which a dedicated Wikipedia version exists, namely the Simple English Wikipedia - although this is only indirectly related to academic writing, it shows that similar problems exist in other areas.

• 2 There's a great piece on this in the New Scientist; Science and Fiction: Plain words, please . There is also another article by the same author published there in April 1968, but I couldn't locate it online. –  LLlAMnYP Commented May 24, 2018 at 10:07
• @LLlAMnYP Yes, I think the article makes a valid point: After reading several papers that are written like this, newcomers will imitate this style, and people might expect this sort of stilted language (and TBH: I often catch myself falling into this pattern...). This may be related to the imposter syndrome (mentioned in another answer), or just a lack of knowledge of things like The Elements Of Style . In any case, one could explain why people are writing like this, but it's much harder to alleviate this problem. –  Marco13 Commented May 24, 2018 at 10:43
• 2 Don't forget that tons of papers are written by non-native English speakers who possibly don't have the proficiency to choose a "plain and simple" (elegant) description but will go with however they manage to put their thoughts into the English they know. Plus, at least for Europeans, the idea whether a given English expression is easily understood will differ between speakers of Romance and Germanic mother tongues - each of them possibly prefering the part of English that is closer to their mother tongue. –  cbeleites Commented May 24, 2018 at 18:40

I think there is a false premise to this question. Namely, the idea that researchers could write the same paper using mostly different words just does not make any sense (to me)!

Using different words makes a different piece of writing.

This is not a phenomenon that is unique to reaearch papers. I don't read books by Faulkner* to my toddler, and I would never complain that Faulkner should have written his books so that they would make sense to a 2-year-old.

Research papers are still pieces of writing. I agonize over words and phrases all the time, and when I'm done writing, there are lots of phrases that illustrate ideas and explain concepts exactly as I want. Outside of changes required/requested for journal editorial purposes, I would be quite unhappy to change these words and phrases. And yes, as others have said, this is affected by who my audience is. But all writing has an intended audience. There is no such thing as a piece of writing intended literally for everybody .

So at least from a personal stand point: I don't use different words mostly because they would be different from the ones I wanted to use :)

*William Faulkner is an American author who has a reputation for some of his writing being difficult to understand/interpret (I would say).

Be more precise: are you talking about unnecessarily complex language, or are you confused/irritated by specific terminology?

Some scientists do tend to use overly complex language to differentiate themselves from others "of lesser intellect" as they think. That does happen and is often just a sign of bad style or even bad knowledge as it suggests a level of expertise that might just not be there.

If you have issues with all scientific papers you might need to improve on your language skills. In science you need to be very precise, and stick to certain terminology. And since science papers are intended to be read by other scientists in the same field of research, authors expect readers to be familiar with terminology in that field and will not explain fundamental things. That's up to you.

However, a good paper should at least be easy to follow even though a reader might stumble upon a few expressions he or she is not familiar with.

• Thank you for your response, maybe this is one of the reasons I am having trouble understanding research papers. But, I wouldn't limit the problem on this issue. Also, the details are too much shortened. For example, in mathematics, it jumps to conclusion without properly explaining the steps it took to come up with the solution. –  user93085 Commented May 22, 2018 at 13:40
• 2 @ZulfidinKhodzhaev skipping mathematical steps which would be shown at undergraduate level is common, and is usually because the author (correctly or otherwise) thinks that they are obvious or trivial, and that they will be equally obvious or trivial to the intended audience. –  Flyto Commented May 22, 2018 at 14:09
• 2 @ZulfidinKhodzhaev Again, including all the mathematical details does not match with the intended purpose of a research paper. Personally I'd like to see us move to papers that have expandable sections with more details in. But journal space is primarily for new knowledge, not for showing you are competent in carrying out calculations. –  Jessica B Commented May 23, 2018 at 6:46
• 1 I generally agree with your response, but: " If you have issues with all scientific papers you might need to improve on your language skills. " To be fair, though, a huge portion of papers are unnecessarily complex. If it all sounds simple, one's boss might think "so why do we need you to do it?" or in case of students, they'd get lower grades because it sounds like it was all easy peasy. We're constantly encouraged (usually without the speaker even realizing it) to make it sound like we're doing true science™ , even if we're describing after how many openings a door hinge breaks. –  Luc Commented May 23, 2018 at 19:01
• Part of what I'd consider "complicated" English may be simpler English to other non-native English speakers - and vice versa: My mother tongue is German (i.e. quite close to English). I often think e.g. scientists with Romance mother tongue using "complicated" English - but I'm sure they'd say the same of my English: it is just that constructions and terms of English that are close to their native language are not so close to my native language. –  cbeleites Commented May 24, 2018 at 18:36

Researchers generally use complicated language because their research covers complex topics. Thus they use words that will be familiar and precise to people who understand the topics. And precisely because these words are familiar to other experts, there is no point trying to explain them in a paper because someone else (probably several someones) will have already explained them better somewhere else. Thus if you are reading a paper as a non-expert (that is, a non-expert in the topic at hand; this applies equally well to experts in other fields) and come across terminology that you don't understand, this is a useful pointer that you should first go and read about it elsewhere. The real danger for non-experts reading scientific papers is that they might read something without realising they didn't understand it.

• 2 "They might read something without realizing they didn't understand it" - very good point. I think it happened to me a lot. –  user93085 Commented May 22, 2018 at 13:47
• 1 But in addition to complicated words, the vast majority of papers also use complex sentence constructions to sound professional. It's not only because it's simply a complex topic. –  Luc Commented May 23, 2018 at 19:04

I don't think anyone can answer this for sure, but here's a personal guess.

Researchers don't actively attempt to write in an arcane manner. Making one's research accessible is a good thing! However, a genuine concern when writing is that one might be making too many "obvious" statements. Nobody wants to be making obvious statements since it both makes the author look junior + makes the work done seem simple (c.f. imposter syndrome ). This gets more drastic the more experienced a researcher is, since more statements appear obvious to them. Of course what's obvious to an experienced researcher is probably not obvious to undergraduates, who are the unfortunate casualties of this.

I also get the feeling that authors want to make it seem like they have processed what was previously written (or simply want to avoid plagiarism), so when they write a paper using an equation in a previous paper, they commonly write the same equation in slightly different notation, e.g. by using different but equivalent expressions for the same factor. Again, experienced researchers have no trouble but undergraduates are unfortunate casualties.

Here are a couple more articles about this: an article in The Atlantic and another in Nature . Googling for "why are academic papers so hard to read" finds a lot more results.

If you find this ridiculous, then when you write papers in the future, try to make it accessible to a wide audience!

• 1 For that to be true, the fast majority of faculty would need to suffer from the imposter syndrome. While I would not be surprised if the majority of PhD students have suffered to some extend from the imposter syndrome, most got over it. –  Maarten Buis Commented May 22, 2018 at 13:10
• @MaartenBuis how do you know? –  Flyto Commented May 22, 2018 at 14:07
• @Flyto How do I know what? –  Maarten Buis Commented May 22, 2018 at 16:04
• @MaartenBuis that most people get over their imposter syndrome. –  Flyto Commented May 22, 2018 at 19:41
• 1 @maarten buis: it seems to be a bit of a stretch to assume that all those who have tenure believe that they deserve it... It's also something of a misrepresentation to describe those who get tenure (or similarly senior positions in places without tenure) as "most". I have no evidence, but I would not be surprised if a majority of academics suffer imposter syndrome from time to time, not just PhD students! –  Flyto Commented May 22, 2018 at 22:33

There is another pair of reasons that many articles are not easily understood but undergrads.

• Most authors are ESL

I once heard a prominent scholar joke "The language of Physics is broken English". This funny thought stems from the fact that while most articles are published in English, the scholars who write them generally know English as second language .

As a native English speaker, and a graduate student, I have found it difficult to write a paper. Why? Because I had to learn the language as it is used in my field of research. For most papers[1], the primary audience is for other scholars within the same field. Thus the language of the research field becomes a sort of dialect that others must conform too.

• Published research must be unambiguous

A good sentence in an article should have one, and only one, interpretation. If a sentence has more than one meaning, it does not properly convey the ideas to the reader. This is critical for a big reason. Each sentence makes a claim, and each claim should be provable by research.

Making sentences with only one meaning is sorta hard; it tends to make them technical, long, and ugly.

In contrast, fiction and journalism tend to give you room to imaging things as you want. Much easier to create beautiful flowing sentences if they can be ambiguous.

• Writing by committee, edited by a grad student

So from what I've seen, most first drafts are written by a grad student who don't write very well (me). It then gets emailed around, and everyone makes changes here and there, and the text of the document becomes incoherent. Then the grad student edits it some more, and is told to submit it. Imagine eating a dinner cooked in this manner!

[1] The exceptions are review papers, which are longer and use much more general language. Easier to read, too

In addition to the comment of Jessica B, there are even some "method" articles which don't even have a general introduction and directly report technical knowledge. The target audience of paper is crucial. However, after reading 10-20 papers you will start to see general outline so you will not find that difficult.

It is difficult to write scientific papers so that everyone can understand. The reasons have been nicely covered in other answers.

I want to point out that the authors would normally include their emails or addresses in their papers so that anyone can write to them and ask questions about their reports.

If you need to do research and read papers from other fields, you can always contact the authors about their papers. If you indicate your purpose and background, they can usually help. Just don't expect them to teach you the whole subject. I would say using the same etiquette for asking questions on stackexchange.

A lot of research papers are arguably written in a deliberately convoluted style to enhance the prestige of the authors: see https://www.plainenglish.co.uk/news/1212-unreadable-academic-writing.html

I rather like this quote: “In academia, it seems that when we have nothing much to say we attempt to distract attention from that sad fact by saying it as pretentiously and at as much length as possible.”

My research supervisor, Maurice Wilkes, had a disarming way of writing that made complex ideas seem very simple, and I have always tried to follow his example. The danger if you do that is that people might not appreciate the value of what you are saying, and many academics don't want to take this risk.

In reviewing papers for conferences I have generally found that when you take time to cut through the jargon, the ideas in difficult-to-read papers are no more profound or precise than the ideas expressed in papers that are much easier to read.

• 6 Jargon is not something you need to "cut through". It is there to help avoid having to write 5 extra pages explaining each and every concept which will already have been covered better in any introductory textbook on the subject (which the reader is assumed to be familiar with, or why would they be reading research on the topic anyway?). –  Tobias Kildetoft Commented May 23, 2018 at 12:44
• 1 The person who wrote that article doesn't seem to understand what they are saying. 'People read' does not have the same implication as the given statement, when you are dealing with research on the topic. –  Jessica B Commented May 23, 2018 at 12:56
• 1 "People read" was from Richard Feynman, not from the author of the article, and was clearly swinging the pendulum in the opposite direction for dramatic effect. But he's justified; the sentence he's quoting uses long words to make what's essentially obvious sound like a profound observation. –  Michael Kay Commented May 23, 2018 at 13:33
• 4 I noticed, in my undergraduate courses, lecturers who understand the topic well, can explain the theory in an easy language. For example, lecturer who came from different field (i.e. physics), had hard time explaining calculus to us. He tried to avoid the meaning behind the theory/ equations and wrote more definitions. –  user93085 Commented May 23, 2018 at 14:43
• 1 @ZulfidinKhodzhaev: I agree, and I disagree with this answer in that I find that people typically appreciate good explanations. –  cbeleites Commented May 24, 2018 at 11:01

Research papers are not generally intended to teach; rather, they are designed to inform. However, that does not mean that an undergraduate cannot use them as a resource. Take the following example sentence from a research paper:

"Theory predicts, and some evidence demonstrates that in lakes, the depth of the thermocline can have a large structural influence on the spatial distribution, and strongly influences the composition of plankton communities."

This one sentence could take an entire chapter of an undergraduate limnology textbook to fully explain. However, there are dictionaries, encyclopedias, and, oh yeah, this thing called Google, that can make short work of gleaning its meaning. Terms like "thermocline" and "spatial distribution" and "plankton communities" can all be Googled and within a few minutes the meaning of the sentence will become clear, even to the most uninitiated.

In summary, if one simply accepts that most high-level research papers simply do not stand alone but in general contain terminology that requires additional research to properly understand, they can become very valuable sources of information.

• The grammatically incorrect comma placement doesn't help either. A lot of academic authors tend to over-extend themselves like this. –  Sneftel Commented May 26, 2018 at 19:51

Quite a lot of answers here being quite defensive of writing in papers. While it is true that jargon is not necessarily bad, that papers aren't aimed at undergraduates and some concepts are just difficult to get across, many papers are more difficult to read than is necessary.

There are several things in the culture of science writing that tend to lead to complex sentence structures and difficult to read prose. This becomes worst when students read academic texts and immitate the style in their own writing because they believe that is the way we must write.

The use of the passive voice. This is where the author removes themselves from the text: "The liquid was added to the flask" rather than "We/I added the liquid to the flask". There is no reason for this other than tradition. In my view it almost always makes things harder to read and should be stamped out.

Space requirements in journals. Some journals even have character limits. This leads authors to try and find "clever" ways to try and word things in as few characters as possible.

Use of unneccesarily formal sounding words "utilized" rather than "used" for example.

• After some months, I realized that you may be on to something. As you said, I am imitating previous papers too (I am afraid that otherwise it will not be accepted). And I have noticed that simple sentences are just converted to complicated sentences using advanced vocabulary for no reason. –  user93085 Commented Apr 25, 2019 at 18:01

In addition to the good answers above: One additional reason is that the intersection of extraordinary science, literary talent and the will to exercise both is extremely small; the number is probably in the single digits. They all are famous. Russell, Feynman, Hawking, Dawkins come to mind. More?

• 10 How do you know they are all famous? If there were members of this set who aren't famous, would you know about them? –  Michael Kay Commented May 23, 2018 at 19:35
• @MichaelKay True, we only know what we know, in case that wasn't obvious. Residual debate may focus on whether the unknowns are known or not; I think in this case they aren't: If writing scientists are not famous they lack one of the three requirements. –  Peter - Reinstate Monica Commented May 24, 2018 at 5:07

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The Use of English Language in Research

2018, Journal for Research Scholars and Professionals of English Language Teaching

English as the global academic language facilitates the international mobility of young researchers (Graddol, D. ,2006). English has been the language of choice for many international scholarly journals. Academic writing is complex, formal, objective, explicit, hedged, and responsible. It is organized and planned precisely and accurately. Glatthorn, A. (1998) says about the academic writing style that the academic writing should strive for clarity, maturity, and formality and should strike a balance between confidence and tentativeness.

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Linguistics references in APA

Adapted by Rendle Williams from the Unified Style Sheet for Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of language, so linguistics papers follow the APA Publication Manual, with a few key adjustments that reflect the priorities of the field. These are guidelines for a references page and technical formatting in a research paper, literature review, or report for linguistics.

Citation style

The primary citation and style pattern used in this discipline is a specialized form of APA. The Unified Style Sheet for Linguistics from linguisticsociety.org has additional guidelines.

• Visual simplicity
• Making writing readable
• Specificity with author and editor names
• Omission of superfluous fonts and punctuation.
• Differentiating specialized symbols and IPA [International Phonetic Alphabet] from the writing itself

As a science, linguistics uses APA to add an element of authority to research. Papers are formatted more like reports or literature reviews than narratives, making note of currency with dates, for the sake of comparison and filling gaps in the research.

Font styles

Distracting font-styles should not be used. Avoid small or all capital letters for author, editor, and article names, since they are not helpful for defining these elements. However, for designating volume, book, journal, and dissertation titles as opposed to article and chapter titles, italics are useful.

Capitalization

Use capitalization to mark categories within references. Capitalize only the first word, in addition to proper names and the first word after a colon, for book, chapter, dissertation, or article titles. Capitalize all content words for journal titles.

This is so that readers can see which titles are recurring and what type of source they are encountering.

Abbreviations

Use edn. as an abbreviation for edition. This distinguishes the edition from the editors within the reference.

For other abbreviations within the paper, write out the full name of the abbreviation or acronym the first time it is used, then abbreviate each instance after that.

• Native American English [NAE]

Punctuation

Ampersands are useful. When listing authors, use the ampersand (&) instead of the word “and” before the last author, without a comma before the “&.” This is helpful for differentiating between authors or ideas that go together and those in comparison or being mentioned at the same time.

• A & B and C & D Ladefoged & Disner and Doe & Marx

Commas, periods, and other punctuation. Separate citation subcomponents, such as multiple authors or editors, with commas and citation components with periods. It is traditionally accepted to use a colon between title and subtitle and between place and publisher.

Dates on the references page do not need parentheses. Using parentheses in a reference entry is also considered superfluous and distracting. It is only necessary to list the four-digit year followed by a period after the author.

• Year. Etc. Angelopoulos, Nikolaos. 2019. Complementizers...

Omit extra punctuation. Any punctuation that adds “visual clutter” should be avoided. With the use of italics and periods to distinguish citation components, signifiers such as quotation marks and parentheses are not necessary. Double quotes and double parentheses should not be used.

Parentheses around ed. are acceptable. While periods and commas are used to separate other citation components, such as authors and editors, “ed.” is a modifier, so it should be distinguished using parentheses and not separated with a comma from the names of the editors.

• Calzolari, Nicoletta et al. (eds.)

Use the full names of authors in references and repeat names if necessary. Use the author’s full name in reference citations to distinguish between authors who may have similar names.

Do not use a line ____ instead of an author’s name on the references page. Even when you have multiple sources by the same author, write out their full name so that each citation can stand on its own.

• Ladefoged, Peter. 2005. A Course in Phonetics , 5 th Cengage Learning.
• Ladefoged, Peter. 2005. Features and parameters for different purposes. Linguistics Department, Los Angeles, CA: UCLA. https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/ladefoge/PLfeaturesParameters.pdf

Nobiliaries or patronymics. These are particles denoting place, status, or parentage that are part of some names. Alphabetize authors with "van," “von,” "de," “di,” or other particles by the first upper-case element of their last name. Include the nobiliary or patronymic particle after the first name, separated by a space.

• López de Ayala
• Ayala, López de

Suffixes. Elements such as junior, senior, or Roman numeral abbreviations are considered sub elements of names and should be listed after them using a comma.

• Eldridge, Anthony, Jr. Walden, Keith, Sr.           Regina, Elizabeth, II.

Types of sources

The following are frequently used sources in linguistics papers which have special guidelines.

Conference proceedings. If the conference proceedings are published with an International Standard Serial Number, or ISSN, treat the proceedings as a journal: include both the full conference name and any commonly used acronym for the conference in the journal title position. If the proceedings are not published with an ISSN, use the full title as listed on the front cover of the proceedings document or title page.

Conference Acronyms. Write out acronyms that are used for conference titles and subtitles after the acronym using parentheses or brackets. If the conference is not commonly referred to with an acronym, note the possible acronym. Be consistent in your use of either parentheses or brackets.

• LREC [International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation]

Chapters. Using “In” to mark chapters of books, similar to other collections or journals, is helpful when separate chapters or components of a collection are referenced. The information for the book or collection in its entirety would be listed as an additional reference.

• Year. Chapter title. In Editor (ed.), Collection title, pagenumbers. Publisher.

Journals. For volume, issue, and page numbers, do not add a space between the numbers or punctuation. Use volumenumber(volumeissue). Startingpage-endingpage. It is not necessary to use the word ‘page,’ p., pp. or any other signifier, since this is an established format for page numbers. Do not use special formatting like bold or italics for this.

• 128(3). 1290-1305.

Issue numbers are parenthetical modifiers of the volume number. Include the issue number, if you can find it, as it is useful in finding an article later. Using as complete of a citation as possible adds credibility to your writing and aids anyone trying to further your work.

Dissertations and theses. To mark something as a thesis or dissertation, follow the Place: Institution format for APA 6 and only Institution for APA 7. The institution and type of paper then represents the publisher. Use capital letter postal abbreviations for state and country names. Take care to consult sources, institutions, and cultural practices for any distinctions between a thesis and a dissertation and a PhD and a doctoral dissertation.

• Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College MA thesis.
• Reno, NV: UNR dissertation.
• Dartmouth College MA thesis.
• UNR dissertation.

Online sources. The URL of the source replaces the publisher or journal title for reference sources found on the internet, such as dictionaries or PDFs.

Since these types of sources may be frequently updated, include the date the material was accessed in parentheses after the URL. This would be the date that something was downloaded or multiple dates if a dictionary or encyclopedia was consulted on several occasions.

Complete reference examples

The following are examples of complete Reference listings for frequently used types of sources.

Ladefoged, Peter & Disner, Sandra Ferrari. 2012. Vowels and consonants , 3 rd edn. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

VandenBos, Gary R. (ed.) 2007. APA dictionary of psychology . Washington DC: American Psychological Association. Retrieved from https://dictionary.apa.org/

Visser, Frederik Theodoor. 1963. An historical syntax of the English language , Part one: Syntactical units with one verb. The Netherlands: E. J. Brill Leiden.

Chapter in a collection or book

Ladefoged, Peter & Disner, Sandra Ferrari. 2012. How we listen to speech. In Vowels and Consonants , 3 rd edn., 99-113. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

Conference proceedings

Calzolari, Nicoletta et al. (eds.) 2016. Tenth international conference on language resources and evaluation. LREC [International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation], Portorož, Slovenia. Retrieved from http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2016/index.html

Corpus or data set

DiPaolo Healey, Antonette, Wilkin, John Price & Xiang, Xin. 2009. Word count broken down by text, Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus , Toronto: Dictionary of Old English Project. Retrieved from https://tapor.library.utoronto.ca/doecorpus/ wordcount.html

Pew Hispanic Center. 2004. Changing channels and crisscrossing cultures: A survey of Latinos on the news media [Data file and code book]. Retrieved from http://pewhispanic.org/datasets/

Dissertation/thesis

Angelopoulos, Nikolaos. 2019. Complementizers and prepositions as probes: Insights from Greek . Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Doctoral Dissertation. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6vf0h5nm#main

Interview, recording and transcript

Winfrey, Oprah. 2012. Interview by Godfrey Mutizwa [Video recording]. Niger Basin Authority. CNBC Africa. Retrieved from www.abndigital.com.

Sculley, John. 2010. John Sculley: The secrets of Steve Jobs’ success [exclusive interview]/Interviewer: Leander Kahney. Cult of Mac. Retrieved from https://www.cultofmac.com/21572/john-sculley-the-secrets-of-steve-jobs-success-exclusive-interview/

Journal article

Levy, Erika S. 2010. Production of French vowels by American-English learners of French: Language experience, consonantal context, and the perception-production relationship. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 128(3). 1290-1305. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.3466879

Boardman, Phillip. 2018, 09 April . “The meaning of Jesus: The canonical text” The Bible as Literature. University of Nevada, Reno. Lecture.

Online news article

Woolfe, Zachary. 2019. Dying languages cry out in ‘Last Whispers’: Lena Herzog’s mixture of enigmatic film and immersive sound evokes a global crisis of linguistic disappearance. The New York Times . Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com /2019 /10/11/arts/music/last-whispers-lena-herzog.html

American Psychological Association. (2010.) Publication manual of the American Psychological Association , 6th ed. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Dubinsky, Stan. (2007.) Unified style sheet for linguistics. Linguistic Journal Editors' Group (Eds.) Linguistic Society of America. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University. Retrieved from https://www.linguisticsociety.org/sites/default/files/style-sheet_0.pdf (2019).

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Speaking, writing and reading are integral to everyday life, where language is the primary tool for expression and communication. Studying how people use language – what words and phrases they unconsciously choose and combine – can help us better understand ourselves and why we behave the way we do.

Linguistics scholars seek to determine what is unique and universal about the language we use, how it is acquired and the ways it changes over time. They consider language as a cultural, social and psychological phenomenon.

“Understanding why and how languages differ tells about the range of what is human,” said Dan Jurafsky , the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor in Humanities and chair of the Department of Linguistics in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford . “Discovering what’s universal about languages can help us understand the core of our humanity.”

The stories below represent some of the ways linguists have investigated many aspects of language, including its semantics and syntax, phonetics and phonology, and its social, psychological and computational aspects.

Understanding stereotypes

Stanford linguists and psychologists study how language is interpreted by people. Even the slightest differences in language use can correspond with biased beliefs of the speakers, according to research.

One study showed that a relatively harmless sentence, such as “girls are as good as boys at math,” can subtly perpetuate sexist stereotypes. Because of the statement’s grammatical structure, it implies that being good at math is more common or natural for boys than girls, the researchers said.

Language can play a big role in how we and others perceive the world, and linguists work to discover what words and phrases can influence us, unknowingly.

How well-meaning statements can spread stereotypes unintentionally

New Stanford research shows that sentences that frame one gender as the standard for the other can unintentionally perpetuate biases.

Algorithms reveal changes in stereotypes

New Stanford research shows that, over the past century, linguistic changes in gender and ethnic stereotypes correlated with major social movements and demographic changes in the U.S. Census data.

Exploring what an interruption is in conversation

Stanford doctoral candidate Katherine Hilton found that people perceive interruptions in conversation differently, and those perceptions differ depending on the listener’s own conversational style as well as gender.

Cops speak less respectfully to black community members

Professors Jennifer Eberhardt and Dan Jurafsky, along with other Stanford researchers, detected racial disparities in police officers’ speech after analyzing more than 100 hours of body camera footage from Oakland Police.

How other languages inform our own

People speak roughly 7,000 languages worldwide. Although there is a lot in common among languages, each one is unique, both in its structure and in the way it reflects the culture of the people who speak it.

Jurafsky said it’s important to study languages other than our own and how they develop over time because it can help scholars understand what lies at the foundation of humans’ unique way of communicating with one another.

“All this research can help us discover what it means to be human,” Jurafsky said.

Stanford PhD student documents indigenous language of Papua New Guinea

Fifth-year PhD student Kate Lindsey recently returned to the United States after a year of documenting an obscure language indigenous to the South Pacific nation.

Students explore Esperanto across Europe

In a research project spanning eight countries, two Stanford students search for Esperanto, a constructed language, against the backdrop of European populism.

Chris Manning: How computers are learning to understand language​

A computer scientist discusses the evolution of computational linguistics and where it’s headed next.

Stanford research explores novel perspectives on the evolution of Spanish

Using digital tools and literature to explore the evolution of the Spanish language, Stanford researcher Cuauhtémoc García-García reveals a new historical perspective on linguistic changes in Latin America and Spain.

Language as a lens into behavior

Linguists analyze how certain speech patterns correspond to particular behaviors, including how language can impact people’s buying decisions or influence their social media use.

For example, in one research paper, a group of Stanford researchers examined the differences in how Republicans and Democrats express themselves online to better understand how a polarization of beliefs can occur on social media.

“We live in a very polarized time,” Jurafsky said. “Understanding what different groups of people say and why is the first step in determining how we can help bring people together.”

Analyzing the tweets of Republicans and Democrats

New research by Dora Demszky and colleagues examined how Republicans and Democrats express themselves online in an attempt to understand how polarization of beliefs occurs on social media.

Examining bilingual behavior of children at Texas preschool

A Stanford senior studied a group of bilingual children at a Spanish immersion preschool in Texas to understand how they distinguished between their two languages.

Predicting sales of online products from advertising language

Stanford linguist Dan Jurafsky and colleagues have found that products in Japan sell better if their advertising includes polite language and words that invoke cultural traditions or authority.

Language can help the elderly cope with the challenges of aging, says Stanford professor

By examining conversations of elderly Japanese women, linguist Yoshiko Matsumoto uncovers language techniques that help people move past traumatic events and regain a sense of normalcy.

Submission guidelines

Types of papers, editorial procedure, manuscript submission, artwork and illustrations guidelines, supplementary information (si), editing services, ethical responsibilities of authors, authorship principles, compliance with ethical standards, competing interests, research data policy and data availability statements, after acceptance.

Open Choice

Links and downloads

Open access publishing.

• Mistakes to avoid during manuscript preparation

Instructions for Authors

FULL-LENGTH PAPERS should describe original, substantive research results involving any aspect of the creation, use, or evaluation of language resources, or provide a detailed description of a new and substantial major resource. In the latter case, the submission should provide a detailed description of the methods used to create and evaluate the resource and provide a comparison with similar resources, where appropriate. Full-length submissions are typically 18-25 pages in length.

SURVEY ARTICLES provide a comprehensive overview of some area or substantial resource relevant to the LRE readership. Survey articles should be written with an eye toward providing an entry point for those who work in the field but not familiar with the particular area or resource, including context, history, and comprehensive references. Survey articles follow the same format as full-length papers.

PROJECT NOTES may describe significant interim research or resource development results, or provide a description of software, standards, minor resources, or projects that are of interest to the journal's readership. Project notes are typically 8-10 pages in length, but no minimum or maximum length is required.

SQUIBS provide a forum for expressing an opinion on topics of interest to the LRE readership. We are especially interested in articles that provide a perspective and/or consider solutions or ways forward for issues of current interest to the field. Squibs are typically 6-8 pages in length.

SPECIAL FOCUS: Applications of established methods to new languages

LRE accepts submissions that apply established methods to a language for the first time, with the intention of supporting development of language resources for lesser-resourced languages. If accepted, the paper will appear in a special section of the journal devoted to papers of this type

Submissions that fall into this category should adhere to the following guidelines:

• The primary interest of a paper that applies known methods to a new language concerns the aspects that differ from previous work. Therefore, the focus of the paper should be upon the characteristics of the language that are relevant to the task and/or pose a challenge for the methods applied. In general, the paper should not provide a comprehensive overview of the linguistic characteristics of the language.
• A literature review should be included, covering both previous work utilizing the same methods as well as previous work addressing the same problem but using different methods. The review should concentrate on a few important papers introducing or using the method(s). If the method(s) have been applied to several languages, it should be made clear that it has not been applied to the one addressed in the paper. If other methods addressing the same task have been applied to the language addressed in the paper, these should be cited as well. The paper should clearly describe the differences between past work in either category and the work described in the paper.
• The choice of the applied methods should be soundly motivated, especially if obvious alternatives exist. The work should involve state-of-the-art methods (e.g., transformers rather than statistical methods); if older methods are applied their use should be justified.
• The paper should not include a detailed overview/description of the method nor a history of its use or development. Do not include include formulas and other explanations of established methods and measures such as precision and recall, etc. that are readily found in textbooks. The paper should cite, but not repeat, mathematical descriptions of newer but known methods (e.g., transformers) used in the study.
• A comprehensive evaluation of results must be included, using appropriate measures.
• Where necessary, the submission should be thoroughly checked, preferably by a professional editing service, for correct use of English and style appropriate for a scholarly journal. Submissions that are not up to LRE's standards of language use and style will be returned without review.
• Note that in the interest of enabling sharing of resources, LRE asks that resources described in our publications be made publicly available and that an indication of where to obtain he resource(s) is included in the paper. If a resource is not publicly available, please clearly state the reasons why.

BOOK REVIEWS

When writing a review, please include:

• overall impression of the book

• the highlights and structure of the book

• for whom the book would be appropriate

• what you found particularly helpful, unclear, weak

• your personal learning, if any

• particular benefits to you in your facilitation, if any

• value of the book for facilitators, if any

• significant contribution of the book, if any, to the field of facilitation

• your recommendation of "must read" portions of the book, if any

• a summary or wrap-up of your reading experience.

Reviews are typically between 1,000 and 3,000 words. Submissions should be sent via email to the Book Reviews Editor Emmanuele Chersoni ( [email protected] ). Please submit your book review in the LRE format (Word or LaTex, for LaTeX submissions, please also send a .pdf version of the manuscript); see the Text Formatting section below.

Single-blind peer review

This journal follows a single-blind reviewing procedure.

This journal also publishes special/guest-edited issues. The peer review process for these articles is the same as the peer review process of the journal in general.

Additionally, if a guest editor authors an article in their issue/collection, they will not handle the peer review process.

Peer Review Procedure

Manuscripts reporting primary research or secondary analysis of primary research will have at least two referees per manuscript. Final decisions to accept or reject can be made by the Editor-in-Chief or an Associate Editor.

Submission of a manuscript implies: that the work described has not been published before; that it is not under consideration for publication anywhere else; that its publication has been approved by all co-authors, if any, as well as by the responsible authorities – tacitly or explicitly – at the institute where the work has been carried out. The publisher will not be held legally responsible should there be any claims for compensation.

Permissions

Authors wishing to include figures, tables, or text passages that have already been published elsewhere are required to obtain permission from the copyright owner(s) for both the print and online format and to include evidence that such permission has been granted when submitting their papers. Any material received without such evidence will be assumed to originate from the authors.

Online Submission

Please follow the hyperlink “Submit manuscript” and upload all of your manuscript files following the instructions given on the screen.

Source Files

Please ensure you provide all relevant editable source files at every submission and revision. Failing to submit a complete set of editable source files will result in your article not being considered for review. For your manuscript text please always submit in common word processing formats such as .docx or LaTeX.

Submitting Declarations

Please note that Author Contribution information and Competing Interest information must be provided at submission via the submission interface. Only the information submitted via the interface will be used in the final published version. Please make sure that if you are an editorial board member and also a listed author that you also declare this information in the Competing Interest section of the interface.

Please see the relevant sections in the submission guidelines for further information on these statements as well as possible other mandatory statements.

Please make sure your title page contains the following information.

The title should be concise and informative.

Author information

• The name(s) of the author(s)
• The affiliation(s) of the author(s), i.e. institution, (department), city, (state), country
• A clear indication and an active e-mail address of the corresponding author
• If available, the 16-digit ORCID of the author(s)

If address information is provided with the affiliation(s) it will also be published.

For authors that are (temporarily) unaffiliated we will only capture their city and country of residence, not their e-mail address unless specifically requested.

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT , do not currently satisfy our authorship criteria . Notably an attribution of authorship carries with it accountability for the work, which cannot be effectively applied to LLMs. Use of an LLM should be properly documented in the Methods section (and if a Methods section is not available, in a suitable alternative part) of the manuscript.

Please provide an abstract of 150 to 250 words. The abstract should not contain any undefined abbreviations or unspecified references.

For life science journals only (when applicable)

• Trial registration number and date of registration for prospectively registered trials
• Trial registration number and date of registration, followed by “retrospectively registered”, for retrospectively registered trials

Please provide 4 to 6 keywords which can be used for indexing purposes.

Statements and Declarations

The following statements should be included under the heading "Statements and Declarations" for inclusion in the published paper. Please note that submissions that do not include relevant declarations will be returned as incomplete.

• Competing Interests: Authors are required to disclose financial or non-financial interests that are directly or indirectly related to the work submitted for publication. Please refer to “Competing Interests and Funding” below for more information on how to complete this section.

Please see the relevant sections in the submission guidelines for further information as well as various examples of wording. Please revise/customize the sample statements according to your own needs.

Text Formatting

Manuscripts should be submitted in Word.

• Use a normal, plain font (e.g., 10-point Times Roman) for text.
• Use italics for emphasis.
• Use the automatic page numbering function to number the pages.
• Do not use field functions.
• Use tab stops or other commands for indents, not the space bar.
• Use the table function, not spreadsheets, to make tables.
• Use the equation editor or MathType for equations.
• Save your file in docx format (Word 2007 or higher) or doc format (older Word versions).

Manuscripts with mathematical content can also be submitted in LaTeX. We recommend using Springer Nature’s LaTeX template .

Please use the decimal system of headings with no more than three levels.

Abbreviations

Abbreviations should be defined at first mention and used consistently thereafter.

Footnotes can be used to give additional information, which may include the citation of a reference included in the reference list. They should not consist solely of a reference citation, and they should never include the bibliographic details of a reference. They should also not contain any figures or tables.

Footnotes to the text are numbered consecutively; those to tables should be indicated by superscript lower-case letters (or asterisks for significance values and other statistical data). Footnotes to the title or the authors of the article are not given reference symbols.

Always use footnotes instead of endnotes.

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments of people, grants, funds, etc. should be placed in a separate section on the title page. The names of funding organizations should be written in full.

Cite references in the text by name and year in parentheses. Some examples:

• Negotiation research spans many disciplines (Thompson, 1990).
• This result was later contradicted by Becker and Seligman (1996).
• This effect has been widely studied (Abbott, 1991; Barakat et al., 1995; Kelso & Smith, 1998; Medvec et al., 1999).

Authors are encouraged to follow official APA version 7 guidelines on the number of authors included in reference list entries (i.e., include all authors up to 20; for larger groups, give the first 19 names followed by an ellipsis and the final author’s name). However, if authors shorten the author group by using et al., this will be retained.

Reference list

The list of references should only include works that are cited in the text and that have been published or accepted for publication. Personal communications and unpublished works should only be mentioned in the text.

Reference list entries should be alphabetized by the last names of the first author of each work.

Journal names and book titles should be italicized .

If available, please always include DOIs as full DOI links in your reference list (e.g. “https://doi.org/abc”).

• Journal article Grady, J. S., Her, M., Moreno, G., Perez, C., & Yelinek, J. (2019). Emotions in storybooks: A comparison of storybooks that represent ethnic and racial groups in the United States. Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 8 (3), 207–217. https://doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000185
• Article by DOI Hong, I., Knox, S., Pryor, L., Mroz, T. M., Graham, J., Shields, M. F., & Reistetter, T. A. (2020). Is referral to home health rehabilitation following inpatient rehabilitation facility associated with 90-day hospital readmission for adult patients with stroke? American Journal of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation . Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1097/PHM.0000000000001435
• Book Sapolsky, R. M. (2017). Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst . Penguin Books.
• Book chapter Dillard, J. P. (2020). Currents in the study of persuasion. In M. B. Oliver, A. A. Raney, & J. Bryant (Eds.), Media effects: Advances in theory and research (4th ed., pp. 115–129). Routledge.
• Online document Fagan, J. (2019, March 25). Nursing clinical brain . OER Commons. Retrieved January 7, 2020, from https://www.oercommons.org/authoring/53029-nursing-clinical-brain/view
• All tables are to be numbered using Arabic numerals.
• Tables should always be cited in text in consecutive numerical order.
• For each table, please supply a table caption (title) explaining the components of the table.
• Identify any previously published material by giving the original source in the form of a reference at the end of the table caption.
• Footnotes to tables should be indicated by superscript lower-case letters (or asterisks for significance values and other statistical data) and included beneath the table body.

Electronic Figure Submission

• Supply all figures electronically.
• Indicate what graphics program was used to create the artwork.
• For vector graphics, the preferred format is EPS; for halftones, please use TIFF format. MSOffice files are also acceptable.
• Vector graphics containing fonts must have the fonts embedded in the files.
• Name your figure files with "Fig" and the figure number, e.g., Fig1.eps.
• Definition: Black and white graphic with no shading.
• Do not use faint lines and/or lettering and check that all lines and lettering within the figures are legible at final size.
• All lines should be at least 0.1 mm (0.3 pt) wide.
• Scanned line drawings and line drawings in bitmap format should have a minimum resolution of 1200 dpi.

Halftone Art

• Definition: Photographs, drawings, or paintings with fine shading, etc.
• If any magnification is used in the photographs, indicate this by using scale bars within the figures themselves.
• Halftones should have a minimum resolution of 300 dpi.

Combination Art

• Definition: a combination of halftone and line art, e.g., halftones containing line drawing, extensive lettering, color diagrams, etc.
• Combination artwork should have a minimum resolution of 600 dpi.
• Color art is free of charge for online publication.
• If black and white will be shown in the print version, make sure that the main information will still be visible. Many colors are not distinguishable from one another when converted to black and white. A simple way to check this is to make a xerographic copy to see if the necessary distinctions between the different colors are still apparent.
• If the figures will be printed in black and white, do not refer to color in the captions.
• Color illustrations should be submitted as RGB (8 bits per channel).

Figure Lettering

• To add lettering, it is best to use Helvetica or Arial (sans serif fonts).
• Keep lettering consistently sized throughout your final-sized artwork, usually about 2–3 mm (8–12 pt).
• Variance of type size within an illustration should be minimal, e.g., do not use 8-pt type on an axis and 20-pt type for the axis label.
• Avoid effects such as shading, outline letters, etc.
• Do not include titles or captions within your illustrations.

Figure Numbering

• All figures are to be numbered using Arabic numerals.
• Figures should always be cited in text in consecutive numerical order.
• Figure parts should be denoted by lowercase letters (a, b, c, etc.).
• If an appendix appears in your article and it contains one or more figures, continue the consecutive numbering of the main text. Do not number the appendix figures,"A1, A2, A3, etc." Figures in online appendices [Supplementary Information (SI)] should, however, be numbered separately.

Figure Captions

• Each figure should have a concise caption describing accurately what the figure depicts. Include the captions in the text file of the manuscript, not in the figure file.
• Figure captions begin with the term Fig. in bold type, followed by the figure number, also in bold type.
• No punctuation is to be included after the number, nor is any punctuation to be placed at the end of the caption.
• Identify all elements found in the figure in the figure caption; and use boxes, circles, etc., as coordinate points in graphs.
• Identify previously published material by giving the original source in the form of a reference citation at the end of the figure caption.

Figure Placement and Size

• Figures should be submitted within the body of the text. Only if the file size of the manuscript causes problems in uploading it, the large figures should be submitted separately from the text.
• When preparing your figures, size figures to fit in the column width.
• For large-sized journals the figures should be 84 mm (for double-column text areas), or 174 mm (for single-column text areas) wide and not higher than 234 mm.
• For small-sized journals, the figures should be 119 mm wide and not higher than 195 mm.

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Generative AI Images

Please check Springer’s policy on generative AI images and make sure your work adheres to the principles described therein.

Springer accepts electronic multimedia files (animations, movies, audio, etc.) and other supplementary files to be published online along with an article or a book chapter. This feature can add dimension to the author's article, as certain information cannot be printed or is more convenient in electronic form.

Before submitting research datasets as Supplementary Information, authors should read the journal’s Research data policy. We encourage research data to be archived in data repositories wherever possible.

• Supply all supplementary material in standard file formats.
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• To accommodate user downloads, please keep in mind that larger-sized files may require very long download times and that some users may experience other problems during downloading.
• High resolution (streamable quality) videos can be submitted up to a maximum of 25GB; low resolution videos should not be larger than 5GB.

Audio, Video, and Animations

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• Minimum video duration: 1 sec
• Supported file formats: avi, wmv, mp4, mov, m2p, mp2, mpg, mpeg, flv, mxf, mts, m4v, 3gp

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• A collection of figures may also be combined in a PDF file.

Spreadsheets

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Specialized Formats

• Specialized format such as .pdb (chemical), .wrl (VRML), .nb (Mathematica notebook), and .tex can also be supplied.

Collecting Multiple Files

• It is possible to collect multiple files in a .zip or .gz file.
• If supplying any supplementary material, the text must make specific mention of the material as a citation, similar to that of figures and tables.
• Refer to the supplementary files as “Online Resource”, e.g., "... as shown in the animation (Online Resource 3)", “... additional data are given in Online Resource 4”.
• Name the files consecutively, e.g. “ESM_3.mpg”, “ESM_4.pdf”.
• For each supplementary material, please supply a concise caption describing the content of the file.

Processing of supplementary files

• Supplementary Information (SI) will be published as received from the author without any conversion, editing, or reformatting.

In order to give people of all abilities and disabilities access to the content of your supplementary files, please make sure that

• The manuscript contains a descriptive caption for each supplementary material
• Video files do not contain anything that flashes more than three times per second (so that users prone to seizures caused by such effects are not put at risk)

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This journal is committed to upholding the integrity of the scientific record. As a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics ( COPE ) the journal will follow the COPE guidelines on how to deal with potential acts of misconduct.

Authors should refrain from misrepresenting research results which could damage the trust in the journal, the professionalism of scientific authorship, and ultimately the entire scientific endeavour. Maintaining integrity of the research and its presentation is helped by following the rules of good scientific practice, which include*:

• The manuscript should not be submitted to more than one journal for simultaneous consideration.
• The submitted work should be original and should not have been published elsewhere in any form or language (partially or in full), unless the new work concerns an expansion of previous work. (Please provide transparency on the re-use of material to avoid the concerns about text-recycling (‘self-plagiarism’).
• A single study should not be split up into several parts to increase the quantity of submissions and submitted to various journals or to one journal over time (i.e. ‘salami-slicing/publishing’).
• Concurrent or secondary publication is sometimes justifiable, provided certain conditions are met. Examples include: translations or a manuscript that is intended for a different group of readers.
• Results should be presented clearly, honestly, and without fabrication, falsification or inappropriate data manipulation (including image based manipulation). Authors should adhere to discipline-specific rules for acquiring, selecting and processing data.
• No data, text, or theories by others are presented as if they were the author’s own (‘plagiarism’). Proper acknowledgements to other works must be given (this includes material that is closely copied (near verbatim), summarized and/or paraphrased), quotation marks (to indicate words taken from another source) are used for verbatim copying of material, and permissions secured for material that is copyrighted.

Important note: the journal may use software to screen for plagiarism.

• Authors should make sure they have permissions for the use of software, questionnaires/(web) surveys and scales in their studies (if appropriate).
• Research articles and non-research articles (e.g. Opinion, Review, and Commentary articles) must cite appropriate and relevant literature in support of the claims made. Excessive and inappropriate self-citation or coordinated efforts among several authors to collectively self-cite is strongly discouraged.
• Authors should avoid untrue statements about an entity (who can be an individual person or a company) or descriptions of their behavior or actions that could potentially be seen as personal attacks or allegations about that person.
• Research that may be misapplied to pose a threat to public health or national security should be clearly identified in the manuscript (e.g. dual use of research). Examples include creation of harmful consequences of biological agents or toxins, disruption of immunity of vaccines, unusual hazards in the use of chemicals, weaponization of research/technology (amongst others).
• Authors are strongly advised to ensure the author group, the Corresponding Author, and the order of authors are all correct at submission. Adding and/or deleting authors during the revision stages is generally not permitted, but in some cases may be warranted. Reasons for changes in authorship should be explained in detail. Please note that changes to authorship cannot be made after acceptance of a manuscript.

*All of the above are guidelines and authors need to make sure to respect third parties rights such as copyright and/or moral rights.

Upon request authors should be prepared to send relevant documentation or data in order to verify the validity of the results presented. This could be in the form of raw data, samples, records, etc. Sensitive information in the form of confidential or proprietary data is excluded.

If there is suspicion of misbehavior or alleged fraud the Journal and/or Publisher will carry out an investigation following COPE guidelines. If, after investigation, there are valid concerns, the author(s) concerned will be contacted under their given e-mail address and given an opportunity to address the issue. Depending on the situation, this may result in the Journal’s and/or Publisher’s implementation of the following measures, including, but not limited to:

• If the manuscript is still under consideration, it may be rejected and returned to the author.

- an erratum/correction may be placed with the article

- an expression of concern may be placed with the article

- or in severe cases retraction of the article may occur.

The reason will be given in the published erratum/correction, expression of concern or retraction note. Please note that retraction means that the article is maintained on the platform , watermarked “retracted” and the explanation for the retraction is provided in a note linked to the watermarked article.

• The author’s institution may be informed
• A notice of suspected transgression of ethical standards in the peer review system may be included as part of the author’s and article’s bibliographic record.

Fundamental errors

Authors have an obligation to correct mistakes once they discover a significant error or inaccuracy in their published article. The author(s) is/are requested to contact the journal and explain in what sense the error is impacting the article. A decision on how to correct the literature will depend on the nature of the error. This may be a correction or retraction. The retraction note should provide transparency which parts of the article are impacted by the error.

Suggesting / excluding reviewers

Authors are welcome to suggest suitable reviewers and/or request the exclusion of certain individuals when they submit their manuscripts. When suggesting reviewers, authors should make sure they are totally independent and not connected to the work in any way. It is strongly recommended to suggest a mix of reviewers from different countries and different institutions. When suggesting reviewers, the Corresponding Author must provide an institutional email address for each suggested reviewer, or, if this is not possible to include other means of verifying the identity such as a link to a personal homepage, a link to the publication record or a researcher or author ID in the submission letter. Please note that the Journal may not use the suggestions, but suggestions are appreciated and may help facilitate the peer review process.

These guidelines describe authorship principles and good authorship practices to which prospective authors should adhere to.

Authorship clarified

The Journal and Publisher assume all authors agreed with the content and that all gave explicit consent to submit and that they obtained consent from the responsible authorities at the institute/organization where the work has been carried out, before the work is submitted.

The Publisher does not prescribe the kinds of contributions that warrant authorship. It is recommended that authors adhere to the guidelines for authorship that are applicable in their specific research field. In absence of specific guidelines it is recommended to adhere to the following guidelines*:

All authors whose names appear on the submission

1) made substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data; or the creation of new software used in the work;

2) drafted the work or revised it critically for important intellectual content;

3) approved the version to be published; and

4) agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

* Based on/adapted from:

ICMJE, Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors,

Transparency in authors’ contributions and responsibilities to promote integrity in scientific publication, McNutt at all, PNAS February 27, 2018

Disclosures and declarations

All authors are requested to include information regarding sources of funding, financial or non-financial interests, study-specific approval by the appropriate ethics committee for research involving humans and/or animals, informed consent if the research involved human participants, and a statement on welfare of animals if the research involved animals (as appropriate).

The decision whether such information should be included is not only dependent on the scope of the journal, but also the scope of the article. Work submitted for publication may have implications for public health or general welfare and in those cases it is the responsibility of all authors to include the appropriate disclosures and declarations.

Data transparency

All authors are requested to make sure that all data and materials as well as software application or custom code support their published claims and comply with field standards. Please note that journals may have individual policies on (sharing) research data in concordance with disciplinary norms and expectations.

Role of the Corresponding Author

One author is assigned as Corresponding Author and acts on behalf of all co-authors and ensures that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately addressed.

The Corresponding Author is responsible for the following requirements:

• ensuring that all listed authors have approved the manuscript before submission, including the names and order of authors;
• managing all communication between the Journal and all co-authors, before and after publication;*
• providing transparency on re-use of material and mention any unpublished material (for example manuscripts in press) included in the manuscript in a cover letter to the Editor;
• making sure disclosures, declarations and transparency on data statements from all authors are included in the manuscript as appropriate (see above).

* The requirement of managing all communication between the journal and all co-authors during submission and proofing may be delegated to a Contact or Submitting Author. In this case please make sure the Corresponding Author is clearly indicated in the manuscript.

Author contributions

In absence of specific instructions and in research fields where it is possible to describe discrete efforts, the Publisher recommends authors to include contribution statements in the work that specifies the contribution of every author in order to promote transparency. These contributions should be listed at the separate title page.

Examples of such statement(s) are shown below:

• Free text:

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by [full name], [full name] and [full name]. The first draft of the manuscript was written by [full name] and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Example: CRediT taxonomy:

• Conceptualization: [full name], …; Methodology: [full name], …; Formal analysis and investigation: [full name], …; Writing - original draft preparation: [full name, …]; Writing - review and editing: [full name], …; Funding acquisition: [full name], …; Resources: [full name], …; Supervision: [full name],….

For review articles where discrete statements are less applicable a statement should be included who had the idea for the article, who performed the literature search and data analysis, and who drafted and/or critically revised the work.

For articles that are based primarily on the student’s dissertation or thesis , it is recommended that the student is usually listed as principal author:

A Graduate Student’s Guide to Determining Authorship Credit and Authorship Order, APA Science Student Council 2006

Affiliation

The primary affiliation for each author should be the institution where the majority of their work was done. If an author has subsequently moved, the current address may additionally be stated. Addresses will not be updated or changed after publication of the article.

Changes to authorship

Authors are strongly advised to ensure the correct author group, the Corresponding Author, and the order of authors at submission. Changes of authorship by adding or deleting authors, and/or changes in Corresponding Author, and/or changes in the sequence of authors are not accepted after acceptance of a manuscript.

• Please note that author names will be published exactly as they appear on the accepted submission!

Please make sure that the names of all authors are present and correctly spelled, and that addresses and affiliations are current.

Adding and/or deleting authors at revision stage are generally not permitted, but in some cases it may be warranted. Reasons for these changes in authorship should be explained. Approval of the change during revision is at the discretion of the Editor-in-Chief. Please note that journals may have individual policies on adding and/or deleting authors during revision stage.

Author identification

Authors are recommended to use their ORCID ID when submitting an article for consideration or acquire an ORCID ID via the submission process.

Deceased or incapacitated authors

For cases in which a co-author dies or is incapacitated during the writing, submission, or peer-review process, and the co-authors feel it is appropriate to include the author, co-authors should obtain approval from a (legal) representative which could be a direct relative.

Authorship issues or disputes

In the case of an authorship dispute during peer review or after acceptance and publication, the Journal will not be in a position to investigate or adjudicate. Authors will be asked to resolve the dispute themselves. If they are unable the Journal reserves the right to withdraw a manuscript from the editorial process or in case of a published paper raise the issue with the authors’ institution(s) and abide by its guidelines.

Confidentiality

Authors should treat all communication with the Journal as confidential which includes correspondence with direct representatives from the Journal such as Editors-in-Chief and/or Handling Editors and reviewers’ reports unless explicit consent has been received to share information.

To ensure objectivity and transparency in research and to ensure that accepted principles of ethical and professional conduct have been followed, authors should include information regarding sources of funding, potential conflicts of interest (financial or non-financial), informed consent if the research involved human participants, and a statement on welfare of animals if the research involved animals.

Authors should include the following statements (if applicable) in a separate section entitled “Compliance with Ethical Standards” when submitting a paper:

• Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest
• Research involving Human Participants and/or Animals
• Informed consent

Please note that standards could vary slightly per journal dependent on their peer review policies (i.e. single or double blind peer review) as well as per journal subject discipline. Before submitting your article check the instructions following this section carefully.

The corresponding author should be prepared to collect documentation of compliance with ethical standards and send if requested during peer review or after publication.

The Editors reserve the right to reject manuscripts that do not comply with the above-mentioned guidelines. The author will be held responsible for false statements or failure to fulfill the above-mentioned guidelines.

Authors are requested to disclose interests that are directly or indirectly related to the work submitted for publication. Interests within the last 3 years of beginning the work (conducting the research and preparing the work for submission) should be reported. Interests outside the 3-year time frame must be disclosed if they could reasonably be perceived as influencing the submitted work. Disclosure of interests provides a complete and transparent process and helps readers form their own judgments of potential bias. This is not meant to imply that a financial relationship with an organization that sponsored the research or compensation received for consultancy work is inappropriate.

Editorial Board Members and Editors are required to declare any competing interests and may be excluded from the peer review process if a competing interest exists. In addition, they should exclude themselves from handling manuscripts in cases where there is a competing interest. This may include – but is not limited to – having previously published with one or more of the authors, and sharing the same institution as one or more of the authors. Where an Editor or Editorial Board Member is on the author list we recommend they declare this in the competing interests section on the submitted manuscript. If they are an author or have any other competing interest regarding a specific manuscript, another Editor or member of the Editorial Board will be assigned to assume responsibility for overseeing peer review. These submissions are subject to the exact same review process as any other manuscript. Editorial Board Members are welcome to submit papers to the journal. These submissions are not given any priority over other manuscripts, and Editorial Board Member status has no bearing on editorial consideration.

Interests that should be considered and disclosed but are not limited to the following:

Funding: Research grants from funding agencies (please give the research funder and the grant number) and/or research support (including salaries, equipment, supplies, reimbursement for attending symposia, and other expenses) by organizations that may gain or lose financially through publication of this manuscript.

Employment: Recent (while engaged in the research project), present or anticipated employment by any organization that may gain or lose financially through publication of this manuscript. This includes multiple affiliations (if applicable).

Financial interests: Stocks or shares in companies (including holdings of spouse and/or children) that may gain or lose financially through publication of this manuscript; consultation fees or other forms of remuneration from organizations that may gain or lose financially; patents or patent applications whose value may be affected by publication of this manuscript.

It is difficult to specify a threshold at which a financial interest becomes significant, any such figure is necessarily arbitrary, so one possible practical guideline is the following: "Any undeclared financial interest that could embarrass the author were it to become publicly known after the work was published."

Non-financial interests: In addition, authors are requested to disclose interests that go beyond financial interests that could impart bias on the work submitted for publication such as professional interests, personal relationships or personal beliefs (amongst others). Examples include, but are not limited to: position on editorial board, advisory board or board of directors or other type of management relationships; writing and/or consulting for educational purposes; expert witness; mentoring relations; and so forth.

Primary research articles require a disclosure statement. Review articles present an expert synthesis of evidence and may be treated as an authoritative work on a subject. Review articles therefore require a disclosure statement. Other article types such as editorials, book reviews, comments (amongst others) may, dependent on their content, require a disclosure statement. If you are unclear whether your article type requires a disclosure statement, please contact the Editor-in-Chief.

Please note that, in addition to the above requirements, funding information (given that funding is a potential competing interest (as mentioned above)) needs to be disclosed upon submission of the manuscript in the peer review system. This information will automatically be added to the Record of CrossMark, however it is not added to the manuscript itself. Under ‘summary of requirements’ (see below) funding information should be included in the ‘ Declarations ’ section.

Summary of requirements

The above should be summarized in a statement and placed in a ‘Declarations’ section before the reference list under a heading of ‘Funding’ and/or ‘Competing interests’. Other declarations include Ethics approval, Consent, Data, Material and/or Code availability and Authors’ contribution statements.

Please see the various examples of wording below and revise/customize the sample statements according to your own needs.

When all authors have the same (or no) conflicts and/or funding it is sufficient to use one blanket statement.

Examples of statements to be used when funding has been received:

• Partial financial support was received from [...]
• The research leading to these results received funding from […] under Grant Agreement No[…].
• This study was funded by […]
• This work was supported by […] (Grant numbers […] and […]

Examples of statements to be used when there is no funding:

• The authors did not receive support from any organization for the submitted work.
• No funding was received to assist with the preparation of this manuscript.
• No funding was received for conducting this study.
• No funds, grants, or other support was received.

Examples of statements to be used when there are interests to declare:

Non-financial interests: Author C is an unpaid member of committee Z.

Non-financial interests: Author A is on the board of directors of Y and receives no compensation as member of the board of directors.

Non-financial interests: none.

Non-financial interests: Author D has served on advisory boards for Company M, Company N and Company O.

Examples of statements to be used when authors have nothing to declare:

• The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.
• The authors have no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.
• All authors certify that they have no affiliations with or involvement in any organization or entity with any financial interest or non-financial interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript.
• The authors have no financial or proprietary interests in any material discussed in this article.

Authors are responsible for correctness of the statements provided in the manuscript. See also Authorship Principles. The Editor-in-Chief reserves the right to reject submissions that do not meet the guidelines described in this section.

This journal follows Springer Nature research data policy . Sharing of all relevant research data is strongly encouraged and authors must add a Data Availability Statement to original research articles.

Research data includes a wide range of types, including spreadsheets, images, textual extracts, archival documents, video or audio, interview notes or any specialist formats generated during research.

Data availability statements

All original research must include a data availability statement. This statement should explain how to access data supporting the results and analysis in the article, including links/citations to publicly archived datasets analysed or generated during the study. Please see our full policy here .

If it is not possible to share research data publicly, for instance when individual privacy could be compromised, this statement should describe how data can be accessed and any conditions for reuse. Participant consent should be obtained and documented prior to data collection. See our guidance on sensitive data for more information.

When creating a data availability statement, authors are encouraged to consider the minimal dataset that would be necessary to interpret, replicate and build upon the findings reported in the article.

Further guidance on writing a data availability statement, including examples, is available at:

Data repositories

Authors are strongly encouraged to deposit their supporting data in a publicly available repository. Sharing your data in a repository promotes the integrity, discovery and reuse of your research, making it easier for the research community to build on and credit your work.

See our data repository guidance for information on finding a suitable repository.

We recommend the use of discipline-specific repositories where available. For a number of data types, submission to specific public repositories is mandatory.

See our list of mandated data types .

The journal encourages making research data available under open licences that permit reuse. The journal does not enforce use of particular licences in third party repositories. You should ensure you have necessary rights to share any data that you deposit in a repository.

Data citation

The journal recommends that authors cite any publicly available data on which the conclusions of the paper rely. This includes data the authors are sharing alongside their publication and any secondary data the authors have reused. Data citations should include a persistent identifier (such as a DOI), should be included in the reference list using the minimum information recommended by DataCite (Dataset Creator, Dataset Title, Publisher [repository], Publication Year, Identifier [e.g. DOI, Handle, Accession or ARK]) and follow journal style.

See our further guidance on citing datasets.

Research data and peer review

If the journal that you are submitting to uses double-anonymous peer review and you are providing reviewers with access to your data (for example via a repository link, supplementary information or data on request), it is strongly suggested that the authorship in the data is also anonymised. There are data repositories that can assist with this and/or will create a link to mask the authorship of your data.

Support with research data policy

Authors who need help understanding our data sharing policy, finding a suitable data repository, or organising and sharing research data can consult our Research Data Helpdesk for guidance.

See our FAQ page for more information on Springer Nature's research data policy.

Upon acceptance, your article will be exported to Production to undergo typesetting. Shortly after this you will receive two e-mails. One contains a request to confirm your affiliation, choose the publishing model for your article, as well as to arrange rights and payment of any associated publication cost. A second e-mail containing a link to your article’s proofs will be sent once typesetting is completed.

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Depending on the ownership of the journal and its policies, you will either grant the Publisher an exclusive licence to publish the article or will be asked to transfer copyright of the article to the Publisher.

Offprints can be ordered by the corresponding author.

Color illustrations

Online publication of color illustrations is free of charge. For color in the print version, authors will be expected to make a contribution towards the extra costs.

Proof reading

The purpose of the proof is to check for typesetting or conversion errors and the completeness and accuracy of the text, tables and figures. Substantial changes in content, e.g., new results, corrected values, title and authorship, are not allowed without the approval of the Editor.

After online publication, further changes can only be made in the form of an Erratum, which will be hyperlinked to the article.

Online First

The article will be published online after receipt of the corrected proofs. This is the official first publication citable with the DOI. After release of the printed version, the paper can also be cited by issue and page numbers.

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• Increased researcher engagement: Open Choice enables access by anyone with an internet connection, immediately on publication.

It is easy to find funding to support open access – please see our funding and support pages for more information.

*) Within the first three years of publication. Springer Nature hybrid journal OA impact analysis, 2018.

Funding and Support pages

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Open Choice articles do not require transfer of copyright as the copyright remains with the author. In opting for open access, the author(s) agree to publish the article under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

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Form and Function in Language Research

Papers in honour of christian lehmann.

• Edited by: Johannes Helmbrecht , Yoko Nishina , Yong-Min Shin , Stavros Skopeteas and Elisabeth Verhoeven
• X / Twitter

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• Language: English
• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Copyright year: 2009
• Audience: Linguists with a Functional Approach to Language, or interested in Theoretical and Empirical Issues related to Language Description and Comparison
• Front matter: 12
• Main content: 350
• Keywords: Functional Typology
• Published: September 7, 2009
• ISBN: 9783110216134
• Published: August 19, 2009
• ISBN: 9783110216127

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• DOI: 10.36456/bastra.vol10.no1.a7490
• Corpus ID: 268266285

BENTUK CAMPUR KODE DALAM NOVEL LASKAR PELANGI KARYA ANDREA HIRATA

• Febriyani Febri
• Published in Buana Bastra 17 August 2023
• Linguistics

4 References

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