EESC 398 - Technical Communications

The most common structure of a primary source journal article in the sciences includes the following. You'll see these as headers on almost all journal articles, as journal publishers try and standardize the formatting. 

Abstract

An abstract summarizes the elements of the article at a high level. 

Introduction

The introduction provides a short overview of the related literature in the field but does not synthesize findings. This helps a reader to situate the context of the study and why an author devised a new research question to look into. 

Methods and/or Materials

The methods and/or materials section(s) details the steps taken by the research team to collect data and run the experiments or the study. This is hopefully detailed and transparent enough for you as a reader to understand and re-run if needed. 

Results/Findings

The section around results will present the research teams findings from their experiments and will often provide quantitative data to a reader. 

Discussion

The discussion section allows the authors to take their findings above and re-centre them around answering their research question or hypothesis. Look for how they discuss the impacts the research could have to the field or future research goals. 

Conclusion

Every article should include a conclusion where the authors wrap up their points and highlight any outstanding questions. 

References

Where the author(s) will list all of the sources used in their article - typically these will be referenced in the introduction and discussion. 

NOTE: Other primary sources in the sciences may look slightly different - for example, a technical report may not follow the same headers throughout. 

The structure of a secondary source in the sciences is very similar to a primary source but is often plotted out from various format guidelines. These guidelines at times can have limitations of scope for certain disciplines, or lack the details necessary for reporting on certain topics. The following are examples of some guidelines:

• ROSES - used in environmental research
• PRISMA - used in health sciences and many other fields, including Ecology and Evolutionary Biology 
• MAER Network - used in Economics

The biggest differences between the two are the methods section and the results/findings section. The methods are transparent around where the articles used in the synthesis were found (including the database names and the search terms used). The results/findings will often include aggregated data visualizations where the data from each of the studies is pulled together to be compared and contrasted.