Typical Structure of Scientific Papers

When you submit a manuscript to a journal for peer review, there are different guidelines for how the paper should be structured (e.g., names and order of sections, reference style) for that specific journal. But in general, scientific papers typically consist of the following sections:

• Abstract: The abstract is essentially a summary of the content of the paper, including what the authors consider to be the most important results.
• Introduction: This section is probably self-explanatory, but in general (and as applicable), the introduction will provide an overview of the disease being studied, summarize existing literature, outline the novelty of the study, provide the objective of the project, and give rationale for the hypothesis being tested.
• Methods: The methods section is where the authors will go into detail on the different tests used, describe the criteria used to select their participants if it’s a human study, and provide information about the data analysis. It’s very important that methods sections are detailed enough that other researchers can replicate their work.
• Results: This section is rather straightforward in that it states what the researchers found.
• Discussion: The discussion section is where the authors typically provide an interpretation of the results and try to draw connections to other work. There should also be a portion of the discussion that acknowledges the limitations of the study.

A Starting Point for Reading Scientific Papers

All components of a scientific paper are important for different reasons. When it comes to understanding published research results, though, I’ve found that there are three critical pieces to look through: the abstract, the results (specifically the figures), and the discussion.

I generally start with the abstract so I have a frame of reference for the rest of the paper. I don’t focus on the conclusions the authors draw yet, though, so I can review the results with fresh eyes. Then, I move to the figures, which should contain graphical representations of all major results in the study. Using the figure captions to provide necessary context, you can walk through all of the results and focus on things that impact the interpretation of those results. Some of those things include: the number of participants, how spread apart data points are, and the statistical values associated with correlations or comparisons. I also typically try to draw my own conclusions based on the figures before I move on to read the discussion section. 

If you want to experience this process a bit, keep an eye out for OMF Journal Club events whenever an OMF-supported project produces a research publication. In the meantime, you can also find the full list of OMF-supported peer reviewed publications on our website. 

The first session of Journal Club is available to watch here if you’re interested.

Identifying Broader Implications and Thinking Critically

Often, the most challenging part of reading scientific papers is interpreting results, especially in the context of other research results in the field. The authors of a paper will do this to an extent in the discussion section, but researchers also have to be careful to not make too strong of claims based on the results of a singular study. Therefore, readers may still need to think about broader implications of the work themselves, with an understanding that those potential links need to be studied. Part of that process involves identifying the limitations in a study and acknowledging that when papers show different results, it doesn’t always mean that they contradict each other, especially in a multi-system chronic complex disease like ME/CFS.