This article was submitted by Dr. Cawa Tran from the Biology Department. You can download a copy of it here.

Professor George M. Whitesides Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology created a short guide on how to write a scientific paper. He highlights the purpose of a scientific paper and the benefits of creating an outline. He clarifies that “you should, in fact, think of an outline as a carefully organized and presented set of data, with attendant objectives, hypotheses, and conclusions, rather than an outline of text.” He then provides an overview of best practices for constructing an outline, followed by some helpful points of style.