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Guidelines for writing Technical documents in Psychological research

Krishna Prasad Miyapuram


0. The aim of this document is to provide a general overview for research students on technical writing and are comments based on the authors experience. There are no hard rules and the authors should refer to the instructions for authors of the journal to be considered for peer-review carefully before submission. 1. The format of a technical article is as follows: Abstract, Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion, References and acknowledgements. The recommended order of writing is as follows: first materials and methods should be written. This is the most straight-forward and keeps the document flow, overcomes any writers block, and ensures that any details are not missed, Second results section forms the main body of the text, the discussion needs to compare the results with other literature, and introduction needs to be tuned in line with discussion and finally the abstract will summarize everything. Special care should be taken to avoid confusing terminology, technical terms should be used consistently, all abbreviations must be expanded on their first use and consistent use of American or British spellings must be made. It is recommended that the article be written by the lead author (the first author who has mainly conducted the research) in conjunction with the other authors. The senior author (the last author) of the paper is usually the supervisor of research. Before sending for peer-review the manuscript should be checked for spelling and grammatical mistakes. The best way to do a final check is to take a print out and read it marking the required corrections. The automatic checking by word processors should not be used as any mis-spelt word could have been replaced by another correctly spelt word. The research is usually described in past tense. It is strongly recommended to get comments from colleagues not involved directly in research as they can easily point out what is obvious for the researchers may not be understood well by the readers. In general, there are three groups of audience for any research. The first group is the authors themselves, the second group is peer reviewers and the third group is the outside research world. It is the outside research world that is the target of the article. This group can be further put into three categories other research groups specialized in your field, in related fields, and in unrelated fields. The last category is the most difficult audience to explain your research. The article needs to be written with a proper mix explaining all non-standard terminology to appeal to the broader audience. 2. The abstract should contain the summary of everything in the document i.e. it should briefly introduce the topic in no more than 2 sentences, explain the experimental procedures, again in 2 to 3 sentences, and the most important of all, the abstract should drag the attention of the readers to the key results from their research. The abstract is a sort of bait to engage the reader to read the entire article. Further, public databases index the abstracts and the abstracts are made widely available. So abstract is a critical piece of the entire article. The abstract should end with 1 or 2 sentences with the take-home message. The recommended length of abstract for a full-length paper is typically 250 words. In general the abstract

should not have any references or citations. In exceptional cases, the citations can be allowed, which should be expanded in full. 3. The introduction should typically consist of three parts without any subheadings. The first paragraph should put the broader context or the big picture of the current research and filter it down to the focus point of current research. The intermediate paragraphs should do a brief review of literature. The literature review should proceed with typically two sentences per article being referred to. The first should mention what was investigated and the second should mention what were their main findings. The last paragraph of introduction should contain the shortcomings of the previous research and how the current study contributes to fill in a gap in existing literature. The introduction should end with the main hypotheses being tested in the current research. 4. The materials and methods should typically have sub-headings and have clear mention of the sample, stimuli, experimental design, experimental procedures, and data analysis. The sample should describe the size of population, sample characteristics such as demographic information and representativeness of the sample. There should be a mention about ethical conduct of research, particularly if involving biological samples. The stimuli section should describe the equipments and materials used. The experimental design should have a clear link with the hypotheses being tested in the experiment. However, the actual testing of hypothesis should be described only in the data analysis part. The experimental procedures involve the practical and physical settings of the experiment and should describe how the experiment was carried out. What were the instructions to participants, if any. Was any training involved to participants and so on? The data analysis should describe the key measurements or variables that are taken as the outcome of the experiment. How are these variables calculated from the actual observations. The statistical model used to analyze the data and the statistical tests being done on the data. Whether there were any planned comparisons in view of the hypotheses being tested as mentioned in introduction? 5. The results section is the main body of the text. If any figures and tables are used, these should be prepared first together with legends. Each legend should sufficiently describe the contents of the figure and the reader should be able to decipher the key message without having to resort to referring back to the text of the article. The preparation of figures needs special care conforming to the requirements of journal. Often the charts / graphs should be formatted to be black and white. The line styles and marker combinations should be used to make clear distinction between categories of a chart. When presenting any data, these should be statistically correct e.g. use of error bars in graphs etc. Colour should be used only when necessary as many journals have the policy to charge extra for printing colour figures and only print colour when it is necessary. The results section should describe the outcomes of the statistical tests mentioned in the data analysis subsection of materials and methods. However, care must be taken to avoid pure statistical descriptions and instead these should be translated into the language of the hypothesis. E.g. we found that the average height of girls is greater than boys (T(d.f.)=,p<) is a better description than saying that we found significant interaction between gender and height (T(d.f.)=,p<). The results section usually follows the logical order of figures and tables but there should not be a pure repetition in the text and figure legends, although some overlap is unavoidable. The text must cite or refer to all the figures and legends. The results section should usually be comprehensive and many times the key findings are described in detail. The peripheral findings are either

omitted or limited to brief mention and can often be included in appendix or supplementary information. In the results section, there should not be any interpretations of the results, which are supposed to be done in the discussion. It is recommended to use sub-headings to improve clarity of results. Reference to previous literature should be avoided as far as possible in the results section. 6. The discussion section should begin with a brief summary of the main results and highlight the novel findings. The discussion can have sub-headings and if possible (but not necessarily) these can correspond to the sub-headings in the results section. Each paragraph in discussion should be limited to one point. The general style of paragraph should be followed i.e. the starting sentence should mention the topic being discussed and the ending sentence should conclude that point. The intermediate sentences form the body of that paragraph which should have two components one, what previous research has found, two, what current research has found and the explanation for agreement or disagreement between the two. The discussion section should contain the limitations of the current study and directions for future research. The last paragraph of discussion usually would highlight the novel contributions of the current study in the bigger picture as set out in the first paragraph of introduction. The discussion section can optionally have a conclusion paragraph. The conclusion is a different style compared to the abstract and can have more details on results and discussion points (including limitations and future directions), but introductory and experimental descriptions do not have a place in conclusion. 7. References and citations should follow the format requirements of the journal. Many journals only accept peer-reviewed or other scholarly references to be included. All references must be cited and all citations must be referenced. 8. The article should include an acknowledgement section mentioning the funding bodies and thanking individuals that helped the research.

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