Scientific Writing Prof Jatna Supriatna Ph D Dept

Scientific Writing Prof Jatna Supriatna, Ph. D Dept of Biology Univ Indonesia • Experiences: – – Chief Editor, Tropical Biodiversity 1992 -2007 Co-editor, Asian Journal Primatology Managing Editor, Asian Journal of Biodiversity Consulting Editor: • • Tropical Conservation Science (SAGE) Park Journal (IUCN) International Journal of Wildlife research and Policy Biosphere Conservation • See Google Scholar for further info

Scientific Writing But in science the credit goes to the man (or woman) who convinces the world, not to the man (or woman) to whom the idea first occurs Sir Francis Darwin - Scientific? ? ? - Contributing to the world of knowledge - Coherent - Structured - Originality - Scientific style - Critical thinking and insight - No mistakes - A clear focus … but on what?

Task vs. process - - How do you go about the writing task? Why the process is important It is about organization, avoiding frustration, finding your focus, productive writing and … … a final product to be proud of

Scientific style - Formality: creating distance between writer and reader - Goal: objectivity - But style and formulation should not make the reading task impossible - In this section: a few problems related to style and formulation

Writing an introduction - An important structuring mechanism - Anouncing the topic - Motivation to undertake the study - Most important findings in the published literature - Research problem and hypotheses - Brief review of following chapters

Problem statement - Specific - Highly focused, clear - As concrete as possible - Preferably one problem statement; may be broken up into a number of subproblems

Problem statement Discussion of the problem statement in the example text: Can you find a single sentence denoting the problem statement? Where exactly is the focal element in the section? Another example on the overhead. . .

Hypothesis - The answer to your problem statement Should be refutable Should not be negative

Other components - Theoretical framework Literature review Research design: Problem statement(s), hypotheses, pilot study, sample taking, sample size, measuring instruments, statistical techniques, etc. - Presentation of findings - Discussion of findings - Conclusions