Paper Guidelines

The BREW workshop is meant to give the participants the chance to go through all the stages of a scientific conference, including  writing and submitting a scientific paper. The paper you submit should have between 4 and 6 pages (including the references). You can present either your scientific findings, a review covering existing research, or a project plan. Most journals and conferences will have their own, often very detailed requirements regarding how a paper is to be delivered. However, the only requirement for this workshop is that the paper be delivered in the PDF format (however, as a friendly suggestion we'd recommend practicing your LaTeX/BibTeX skills and formatting the paper as a \documentclass[twocolumn]{article}).

The following text covers the most typical sections in a scientific paper presenting a scientific result or method. If you present a project plan, your paper does not need to have a result section, and you can either omit this section or comment on what kind of results you expect to get. Review papers will not be expected to have a result section either.

Title and Abstract

Other researchers read the title and abstract to find out if this paper is interesting to them. Of all the researchers that might read your title in a list of papers, only a fraction will read the abstract, and only a fraction of these will read the paper. Furthermore, the title and abstract are the only things that appear when searching online for scientific papers. All papers submitted to BREW must have a descriptive title and a short abstract, around 100-200 words. The abstract should state what the paper is about and what the main findings of the work are.

Introduction

This section should contain an introduction to the research field providing relevant background information to understand your work. Descriptions and references to the current state in your research field, existing methods and the scientific goal of the work presented are expected. The introduction should be between one half and one page. This is more brief than regular papers, but the introduction is none the less very important, and should contain references to relevant literature in the field, as your reader is not necessarily familiar with your field of research.

Methods

The method section should contain a description of the algorithm or method used in the paper, as well as descriptions of the data sets and databases used. The descriptions should be sufficiently detailed so that other researchers can reproduce the results presented in the paper.

Note that the tone of the methods and results sections is markedly different than the introduction and discussion - just check a published paper to get the feel for what language is appropriate in Methods and Results. How the method or algorithm is to be applied to retrieve the results must also be stated.

Results

The results section should contain your findings supported by tables and figures. In the text you need to refer to all tables and figures. Ideally, the article should be understandable without the figures and tables. At the same time, figures and tables need to be self-explanatory. You should use quantitative rather than vague descriptions (“72% of the mice were less than 2 weeks old” rather than “most of the mice were young”). Discussion of the broader meaning of the results should be held off for the next section.

Discussion

This section should include explanations of the meaning of your results. How do your results compare to other methods and how do your methods contribute to the relevant research field? You should discuss the assumptions you have made for the work as well as possible problems, limitations or extensions. Being open and honest about weaknesses or limitations of your work helps to control the expectations of your readers. Keep in mind that every study has strengths and weaknesses.

References

All your references should be placed at the very end of the paper. Many journals have detailed instructions regarding the format of references, but for BREW we will require no special formatting, only that it is possible to uniquely identify each reference. You should at least include author(s), title, journal and the year of publication in the reference.

Useful resources for writing a scientific paper

Algorithm for writing a scientific manuscript - This article makes good suggestions on how to write a scientific paper - https://iubmb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bmb.20329

Scientific writing: Strategies and tools for students and advisors - Points out useful resources, techniques and tools for scientific writing - https://iubmb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bmb.20815

Writing in the Sciences - Online Course by Stanford University (you can watch the videos without enrolling) - https://www.coursera.org/learn/sciwrite

Scientific writing 101 - https://www.nature.com/articles/nsmb0210-139

Even more resources about scientific writing - https://www.sanchini-writing.com/en/useful-resources/

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