The parts of the paper

A research paper is written part by part, and a reader meets the parts in turn: the title and abstract, read and indexed apart from the text, then the introduction, the methods, the results and the discussion. The parts divide by the part being written, in the order a reader meets them, after the argumentative components a reader expects each part to carry. This branch leaves the sequence of parts as a whole and the reporting guideline that fixes what each discloses to the structure and the reporting guideline, planning the paper before any part is drafted to outlining the manuscript, the authorship statements to authorship, the disclosure, registry and data statements to assembling the submission package, what a particular study design must report to reports by study design, and the general craft of tables, figures and concise sentences to presenting numbers and language and style.

• Give each section the conceptual components a reader expects — the argumentative components of each part, the components of the introduction most at risk of being left out, and components put in the wrong part
• The title and abstract — the title and keywords a searcher finds the paper by, an abstract that stands alone, and fitting it inside its word limit
• The introduction — the funnel from the broad problem to the gap, the aim sentence it narrows to, and the basic-science hypothesis
• Write the methods section of a research paper — what the section has to achieve, the default order from design and ethics through conduct and sample size to the statistics, what each part contains, its voice, tense, materials and data, and when to write it
• Writing the results section — selecting the data, what the reporting guidelines require, the order from the subjects through the primary outcome to the secondary ones, the orientation, data and statement that make up each result, and tense and numbers
• The discussion — what it is for and the order of its parts, what guidelines and journals ask for, the opening, comparison with the literature, limitations, strengths and generalisability, interpretation and conclusions, the close, transitions and new data, disagreement among the authors, and a second, independent discussion