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Abstract Scientific writing is an unique way of presenting the observed data in a precise, concise and readable form. Publication of scientific papers in a journal is considered the most appropriate and acceptable means of informing the peer group regarding the data generated. It is a known fact that a well written manuscript goes through the various stages prior to publication much faster than a poorly written one. Moreover a poorly written manuscript can easily hinder the publication of a good research work. For this reason it is essential for the researchers to have a clear idea regarding scientific writing in accordance to the journal of their interest and care should be taken to make it appear exceptional for the reviewers as well as outstanding for the readers. One of the major factors drawing the attention of readers while searching for an article is the title of the research paper that helps to decide further reading. Title - is an important component of research paper and will help the readers to quickly access all the relevant information at a glance. It can be in the form of a description, topic, statement or a question. A good title is simple, concise, informative, accurate, specific and provides information regarding the study design and animals used. A self explanatory title, followed by a structured manuscript and a uniform reference pattern may aid in the early acceptance of the manuscript. Several steps have been taken in the past to standardise the structure of the manuscript for publishing in a scientific journal. Currently the IMRaD format in the sequence of Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion is the most accepted layout followed by many biomedical journals. Introduction - should be short and must substantiate the reason for starting the research work with clear hypothesis. The introduction should always contain a clear statement regarding the hypothetical query at the end. It should be kept short, simple and measures should be taken to avoid over or under estimation of the study.
Materials and methods - should include the selected subjects and methods used to test the hypothesis. This section must provide an outline of the experimental design/clinical study design and should mention the statistical analysis used. There should be a mentioning of the information related to compliance with ethical requirements of the research and documentation of approval from the institutional review board. Results - consists of only data and features the salient findings with supporting evidence. The results can be presented in the form of text, tables and graphs or figures. Both tables and figures should be related to each other logically in a sequence and should be self explanatory by themselves. The values should be expressed as mean + SD or mean + SEM and the p value should be indicated. Discussion - should contain an analysis of the results together with a review of the relevant literature. The most important component under this section is the interpretation of results. Discussion should also show how previous studies relate to or differ from the present study. The first paragraph of the section should be used to interpret the findings of the study in terms of the problem and should state whether the hypothesis has been proven or rejected. The last paragraph of discussion should contain the outline of conclusions that have been reached and indicate where the authors intend to go from there. References - indicate the sources of information and provide credibility to the published work. This should be uniform and modified to suit the style of a journal chosen for submission. Currently some of the bibliographic software namely Reference manager, End note etc are used for writing the manuscript. These software facilitate the writing the manuscript and citing the references as per the journal format. In the present scenario, submitting the article to the journal has been made easy through online submission. The Manuscript Central is the software used by several journals editorial offices to manage the online submission and peer review of articles. The author needs to be familiar with this software. Before submitting the manuscript, care should be taken to write a structured abstract in a standard format to gain a good impression regarding the manuscript. Throughout the
manuscript as well as abstract, the language should be kept simple and the findings of the study should be communicated to the reader in a clear understandable form.