Whitesides' Group: Writing a Paper**

By George M. Whitesides*

1. What is a Scientific Paper?

A paper is an organized description of hypotheses, data and

conclusions, intended to instruct the reader. Papers are a cen-

tral part of research. If your research does not generate

papers, it might just as well not have been done. ªInteresting

and unpublishedº is equivalent to ªnon-existentº.

Realize that your objective in research is to formulate and

test hypotheses, to draw conclusions from these tests, and to

teach these conclusions to others. Your objective is not to

ªcollect dataº.

A paper is not just an archival device for storing a com-

pleted research program; it is also a structure for planning

your research in progress. If you clearly understand the pur-

pose and form of a paper, it can be immensely useful to you in

organizing and conducting your research. A good outline for

the paper is also a good plan for the research program. You

should write and rewrite these plans/outlines throughout the

course of the research. At the beginning, you will have mostly

plan; at the end, mostly outline. The continuous effort to un-

derstand, analyze, summarize, and reformulate hypotheses on

paper will be immensely more efficient for you than a process

in which you collect data and only start to organize them

when their collection is ªcompleteº.

2. Outlines

2.1. The Reason for Outlines

I emphasize the central place of an outline in writing

papers, preparing seminars, and planning research. I espe-

cially believe that for you, and for me, it is most efficient to

write papers from outlines. An outline is a written plan of the

organization of a paper, including the data on which it rests.

You should, in fact, think of an outline as a carefully orga-

nized and presented set of data, with attendant objectives,

hypotheses, and conclusions, rather than an outline of text.

An outline itself contains little text. If you and I can agree

on the details of the outline (that is, on the data and organiza-

tion), the supporting text can be assembled fairly easily. If we

do not agree on the outline, any text is useless. Much of the

time in writing a paper goes into the text; most of the thought

goes into the organization of the data and into the analysis. It

can be relatively efficient in time to go through several (even

many) cycles of an outline before beginning to write text;

writing many versions of the full text of a paper is slow.

All writing that I doÐpapers, reports, proposals (and, of

course, slides for seminars)ÐI do from outlines. I urge you to

learn how to use them as well.

2.2. How Should You Construct an Outline?

The classical approach is to start with a blank piece of

paper, and write down, in any order, all important ideas that

occur to you concerning the paper. Ask yourself the obvious

questions: ªWhy did I do this work?º; ªWhat does it mean?º;

ªWhat hypotheses did I mean to test?º; ªWhat ones did I

actually test?º; ªWhat were the results? Did the work yield a

new method of compound? What?º; ªWhat measurements

did I make?º; ªWhat compounds? How were they character-

ized?º. Sketch possible equations, figures, and schemes. It is

essential to try to get the major ideas. If you start the research

to test one hypothesis, and decide, when you see what you

have, that the data really seem to test some other hypothesis

better, don't worry. Write them both down, and pick the best

combinations of hypotheses, objectives, and data. Often the

objectives of a paper when it is finished are different from

those used to justify starting the work. Much of good science

is opportunistic and revisionist.

When you have written down what you can, start with an-

other piece of paper and try to organize the jumble of the first

one. Sort all of your ideas into three major heaps (1±3).

1. Introduction

Why did I do the work? What were the central motivations

and hypotheses?

2. Results and Discussion

What were the results? How were compounds made and

characterized? What was measured?

3. Conclusions

What does it all mean? What hypotheses were proved or

disproved? What did I learn? Why does it make a difference?

Adv. Mater. 2004, 16, No. 15, August 4 DOI: 10.1002/adma.200400767  2004 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim 1375

[*] Prof. G. M. Whitesides

Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology

Harvard University

Cambridge, MA 02138 (USA)

E-mail: gmwhitesides@gmwgroup.harvard.edu

[**] The text is based on a handout created on October 4, 1989.

ESSAY

Next, take each of these sections, and organize it on yet

finer scale. Concentrate on organizing the data. Construct fig-

ures, tables, and schemes to present the data as clearly and

compactly as possible. This process can be slowÐI may sketch

a figure five to ten times in different ways trying to decide

how it is most clear (and looks best aesthetically).

Finally, put everythingÐoutline of sections, tables, sketches

of figures, equationsÐin good order.

When you are satisfied that you have included all the data

(or that you know what additional data you intend to collect),

and have a plausible organization, give the outline to me. Sim-

ply indicate where missing data will go, how you think

(hypothesize) they will look, and how you will interpret them

if your hypothesis is correct. I will take this outline, add my

opinions, suggest changes, and return it to you. It usually takes

four to five iterations (often with additional experiments) to

agree on an outline. When we have agreed, the data are usual-

ly in (or close to) final form (that is, the tables, figures, etc., in

the outline will be the tables, figures,... in the paper).

You can then start writing, with some assurance that much

of your prose will be used.

The key to efficient use of your and my time is that we start

exchanging outlines and proposals as early in a project as pos-

sible. Do not, under any circumstances, wait until the collection

of data is ªcompleteº before starting to write an outline. No

project is ever complete, and it saves enormous effort and

much time to propose a plausible paper and outline as soon as

you see the basic structure of a project. Even if we decide to

do significant additional work before seriously organizing a

paper, the effort of writing an outline will have helped to

guide the research.

2.3. The Outline

What an outline should contain:

1. Title

2. Authors

3. Abstract

Do not write an abstract. That can be done when the paper

is complete.

4. Introduction

The first paragraph or two should be written out complete-

ly. Pay particular attention to the opening sentence. Ideally, it

should state concisely the objective of the work, and indicate

why this objective is important.

In general, the Introduction should have these elements:

d The objectives of the work.

d The justification for these objectives: Why is the work im-

portant?

d Background: Who else has done what? How? What have

we done previously?

d Guidance to the reader: What should the reader watch for

in the paper? What are the interesting high points? What

strategy did we use?

d Summary/conclusion: What should the reader expect as

conclusion? In advanced versions of the outline, you

should also include all the sections that will go in the

Experimental section (at the level of paragraph subhead-

ings) and indicate what information will go in the Micro-

film section.

5. Results and Discussion

The results and discussion are usually combined. This sec-

tion should be organized according to major topics. The sepa-

rate parts should have subheadings in boldface to make this

organization clear, and to help the reader scan through the

final text to find the parts of interest. The following list

includes examples of phrases that might plausibly serve as

section headings:

d Synthesis of Alkane Thiols

d Characterization of Monolayers

d Absolute Configuration of the Vicinal Diol Unit

d Hysteresis Correlates with Roughness of the Surface

d Dependence of the Rate Constant on Temperature

d The Rate of Self-Exchange Decreases with the Polarity of

the Solvent

Try to make these section headings as specific and informa-

tion-rich as possible. For example, the phrase ªThe Rate of

Self-Exchange Decreases with The Polarity of The Solventº is

obviously longer than ªMeasurement of Ratesº, but much

more useful to the reader. In general, try to cover the major

common points:

d Synthesis of starting materials

d Characterization of products

d Methods of characterization

d Methods of measurement

d Results (rate constants, contact angles, whatever)

In the outline, do not write any significant amount of text,

but get all the data in their proper place: Any text should sim-

ply indicate what will go in that section.

d Section Headings

d Figures (with captions)

d Schemes (with captions and footnotes)

d Equations

d Tables (correctly formatted)

Remember to think of a paper as a collection of experimen-

tal results, summarized as clearly and economically as possible

in figures, tables, equations, and schemes. The text in the

paper serves just to explain the data, and is secondary. The

more information can be compressed into tables, equations,

etc., the shorter and more readable the paper will be.

G. M. Whitesides/Whitesides' Group: Writing a Paper

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6. Conclusions

In the outline, summarize the conclusions of the paper as a

list of short phrases or sentences. Do not repeat what is in the

Results section, unless special emphasis is needed. The Con-

clusions section should be just that, and not a summary. It

should add a new, higher level of analysis, and should indicate

explicitly the significance of the work.

7. Experimental

Include, in the correct order to correspond to the order in

the Results section, all of the paragraph subheadings of the

Experimental section.

2.4. In Summary

d Start writing possible outlines for papers early in a project.

Do not wait until the ªendº. The end may never come.

d Organize the outline and the paper around easily assimi-

lated dataÐtables, equations, figures, schemesÐrather

than around text.

d Organize in order of importance, not in chronological or-

der. An important detail in writing papers concerns the

weight to be given to topics. Neophytes often organize a

paper in terms of chronology: that is, they give a recitation

of their experimental program, starting with their cher-

ished initial failures and leading up to a climactic success-

ful finale. This approach is completely wrong. Start with

the most important results, and put the secondary results

later, if at all. The reader usually does not care how you

arrived at your big results, only what they are. Shorter

papers are easier to read than longer ones.

3. Some Points of Style

d Do not use nouns as adjectives:

Not:

ATP formation; reaction product

But:

formation of ATP; product of the reaction

d The word ªthisº must always be followed by a noun, so

that its reference is explicit.

Not:

This is a fast reaction; This leads us to conclude

But:

This reaction is fast; This observation leads us to conclude

d Describe experimental results uniformly in the past tense.

Not:

Addition of water gives product.

But:

Addition of water gave product.

d Use the active voice whenever possible.

Not:

It was observed that the solution turned red.

But:

The solution turned red. or

We observed that the solution turned red.

d Complete all comparisons.

Not:

The yield was higher using bromine.

But:

The yield was higher using bromine than chlorine.

d Type all papers double-spaced (not single- or one-and-a-

half-spaced), and leave two spaces after colons, and after

periods at the end of sentences. Leave generous margins.

Assume that we will write all papers using the style of the

American Chemical Society. You can get a good idea of this

style from three sources:

d The journals. Simply look at articles in the journals and

copy the organization you see there.

d Previous papers from the group. By looking at previous

papers, you can see exactly how a paper should ªlookº. If

what you wrote looks different, it probably is not what we

want.

d The ACS Handbook for Authors. Useful, detailed, espe-

cially the section on references, pp. 173±229.

I also suggest you read Strunk and White, The Elements of

Style (Macmillan: New York, 1979, 3rd ed.) to get a sense for

usage. A number of other books on scientific writing are in

the group library; these books all contain useful advice, but

are not lively reading. There are also several excellent books

on the design of graphs and figures.

G. M. Whitesides/Whitesides' Group: Writing a Paper

Adv. Mater. 2004, 16, No. 15, August 4 http://www.advmat.de  2004 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim 1377

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