1. Abstract. 整体要求简练,言简意赅,因为绝大部分journal对Abstract都有字数限制,一般150~250 words. 先简单描述一下自己工作的前沿背景,几句话,然后引出自己的实验(“In this paper...”; “Herein...” or “Here, we...”),主要陈述实验结果,可稍带提一下所用到的重要方法的名称,然后说明你的结果的意义“These data suggest...”;最后总结拔高“In a word,...”or “In summary,...”.
2. Introduction. 描述跟你的实验相关的领域研究现状及存在的问题,自然的过度到你实验的意义和重要性。“Although..., there are still... so far”“Here, for the first time, we have used...”。如果你前面已发过相关的文章,要插入引用一下“We recently showed that...”或“Our previous studies have shown that.... These results verify that...”“Here...”“ To explore this hypothesis, we generated...”.写好Introduction需要有大量的参考文献做基础,摘取短语、词组、句子进行reorganize。调节好前后句子的逻辑顺序及衔接。
3. Materials and Methods. 这部分可以从别的文章摘到现成的方法描述,加以改造,替换成自己的实验条件,变成自己的表达方式,近几年journal对抄袭句子的现象抓得特别严,多注意。太复杂的经典方法,可以简单描述后加上参考文献“Briefly, ... [ref]”;也可以直接引用参考文献“The...method was performed as described previously [ref]”.
4. Results. 这一部分很重要。要按照一定的逻辑顺序进行organize,结果描述要准确、专业,一些重要的数据可以放在结果部分的文字描述中,如IC50、EC50、抑制百分率、P值等等。这部分不能像Introduction那样写太多的理论性的东西。每段的开头或一些连接的地方可以简单地用一些理论性的或总结性的句子。在陈述你的实验操作和看到的结果和表面现象时用过去时态,陈述不以人的意志为转移的规律、结论性的内容时用一般现在时。一些常用的短语及句式有:“In order to prove..., we used...”;“We have set up...”;“To demonstrate..., we further...”;“Consistently/Consistent with...”;“Compared with...”;“Thus, at current time, we have evidence that...”;“We next characterized...”;“We found that...”;“We have noticed that...”;“It’s known that...”;“So we introduced... In our study...”;“In contrast...”;“These data suggest that...”;“So we next explored...”;“Notably, ...”;“Importantly, ...”;“Furthermore...”; “Moreover...”;“We have previously shown that...”;“As shown in Fig. 1, ...”;“Fig. 1 shows...”;“Overall, ...”;“Taken together, these results suggest...”;“These data are consistent with the notion that...”;“Next, we examined the effect of...”;“We next set out to determine whether...”;“Lastly, we examined...”;“In order to establish...”.
5. Discussion. 这一部分最重要,也最难写,是大家最容易犯错的地方。即使是对一些发了很多文章的老教授来说,这部分仍然是块硬骨头,尤其是top paper,Discussion 非常重要,因为评阅你paper的人,都是世界顶级的大牛。首先要注意,Discussion 不能过多地罗列和重复结果部分的内容,这是常犯的错误,因为感觉没什么可说的,就重复结果来充数。讨论部分可以就你的实验结果论述与你的结果密切相关的研究现状存在的一系列问题,你的工作是解决的哪一部分问题。讨论要延伸出很多结果部分所体现不出来的信息,如你的工作的长期效应、潜在效应、与他人工作的比较,相同之处、不同之处、你的优势、你的结果存在的问题、局限性及其原因、将来可以改进的地方等等。也可以就你实验中得到的跟预期不一致的interesting的结果简单讨论一下可能的原因。对一些top的paper来说,你的research中的一些问题是很难躲得掉的,还不如主动提出讨论,变被动为主动。对一般的文章,另当别论,一般大家都喜欢画一个圆满的圈。写作风格上每个人不一样,有温文尔雅、按部就班的,也有如西部牛仔一样豪放的,都没问题。讨论开始,可以开门见山:“Here, we describe....”或“In this paper, we show that.... Importantly, ..., suggesting...”下面是一些常用的短语和句式:“Overall, our studies establish the...”;“Although there are important discoveries revealed by these studies, there are also limitations. First, ...;Second, ...; Third, ...;Fourth, ...;Last, ...Overall, ...”;“Furthermore, our results suggest that...”;“Our results suggest a possibility of...”;“One important future direction of ...is...”;“To this end, we show that...”;“However, none of these approaches to date holds the...”;“Our studies serve as a proof-of-concept that...”;“This could explain why...”;“Alternatively, ... may be operative...”;“Thus, future iterations of ... may in fact demonstrate even greater potency.”;“On the other hand, the lack of...”;“In summary, we have identified...”;“Our results confirm that...”;“These studies thus offer a new strategy to treat...”