Notes on Writing your Journal Article:

 

MOST IMPORTANT: Be very careful about following the outline of articles from previous theses. They are commonly terrible, by far the weakest parts of the thesis as
they are done at the last minute and usually thrown together. The best way to approach the paper is as follows:

1. Selection of the most appropriate journal: Look at your list of references and see what the most common one is. That is probably the best home for your article
because that journal is used to publishing articles from your field of research.

2. Journal Author Guidelines: Having selected the journal (and please note that Science Direct is NOT a journal, it is a subscription service DIT has for a
collection of journals each with different set of journal author guidelines. To find them, go the particular journal website and search for “journal author guidelines”
or simply google the “name of the journal” combined with “journal author guidelines”. Print them off and read them. You will need a copy anyway to bind into your
thesis.

3. Writing style for the chosen Journal : The guidelines should give you this but in truth, it is far easier to read 3 -5 articles from that journal and see what
sections and information is required,, the kind of language used and the way it is laid out. You can then model your article upon that.

4. Results to be included in the Paper: The article is NOT necessarily a summary of the whole thesis hence; the article does not have to include ALL of the work
in the thesis. It may do if you have found out very little but if you have a lot of results, it would be best to select the most significant or interesting results
only and discuss those ignoring the less interesting material (remember space is limited in a paper)

5. How to select the most significant or interesting results: This is usually obvious. They are the results which are most novel or could lead to the greatest
consequences or have the most application. Note that negative results can also be the significant. Finding out what does not work is very often as important as finding
out that it does work. The results need to tell a story or make an argument or come to a conclusion so if you have results not relevant to that story do not include
them; use them for a second paper (alternatively, make a longer story). I am NOT saying that any results that contradict the story you are trying to make (i.e. your
conclusion) should be ignored. On the contrary, they MUST be included and an explanation of the INCONSISTANCY is included.

The following are some instructions which might help in writing your journal article.

1. Authors: Obviously you should have your name but it should also include the name of your supervisor (unless you did the research alone) or whoever else worked
with you, as they have contributed to the research in terms of advice and direction thus deserve credit for their work as second author.

2. Abstract: As in the thesis itself, there should be no citations (references) in the text of abstract (that is because you have them later in the paper). As
the name suggest it summarises the paper so should have something on the literature, objectives, methodology, results, discussion , conclusions and recommendations-
the keys bits of course give the very limited space available;

3. The Methodology: This should be written in the past tense for the methodology as you are reporting on an event from the past. There should be enough there to
allow another researcher to repeat your work. So you need to describe what you did and the reason for choosing that methodology along with any shortcoming of your
methodology or the way perhaps your survey was answered or conducted. It describes not just the experimental work but also the means of analysis such as the
statistical methods employed. It should NOT have any text about the objective of the research (was already in the Introduction/ Literature review) nor the results.

4. The Results: As the title suggest, this lists the results and any graphs or table you can use to illustrate these result and a highlight of the key findings.
HOWEVER, it should NOT have any explanation of the methodology (as previously done) or ANY explanation of these results (done next in Discussion).

5. Reviewing, selecting & organising the results: First of all analyse the results of each individual question and see if that throws up anything interesting.
Secondly go through the results of each question and do a cross tabulation. You will for example, have asked for the gender, age, income, educational status of each of
the respondents. Hence, need to find out for each question, if there were any difference between the answers from each of the groups, so did males give a different
answer to females or did older people have a different view to younger people etc. This is called a cross tabulation. This will add depth to your results as later you
can better explain the significance to the results. So for example if older people liked a product less than younger people you could (IN THE DISCUSSION) discuss that
the market will grow as the younger people age or vice versa. Also if for example women have a greater liking for a product and if they also were the main people who
went shopping the effect upon sales would greater than if shopping was equally shared by male and female. This will be the bedrock of your discussion if you have used
categorical data (age, sex, etc.) in your survey.

The next step is to organise these results into themes rather than listing the results question by question- you can do it like this but it is really boring and
unimaginative. Having analysed and cross tabulated all the results you need to write them down on a large piece of paper (or even put each result on its own piece of
paper and lay them out on a table. Look at them, think about them, (dream about them even!) then see what themes there are in your results. The themes will effectively
be your final conclusions so there will only be 3 -6. You then group the results into those themes. You then organise the results according to the themes rather than
the question number. Note also that the themes are given a name, obviously, but they are NOT called after the question number. Hence when you are titling graphs etc.,
do not refer to the question number but give it a title which describes what is in it. I gave notes previously on report writing which covered this- the main point
being that a graph/ table should be stand alone in that it contains sufficient information in the title, axes labels sample size (n==?), etc. to tell a complete
story. You may not be using all of the cross tabs nor even all your primary results, only the significant ones. At the end of each result, you can highlight its
significance. This will effectively be the skeleton for your discussion. Lin these themes to te

6. The Discussion: As I have previously said, this is the hardest part of a thesis to get right but it is also the section which differentiates a really smart
researcher from the less able. However, if you have organised the results as above, it is relatively easy. I will explain how to do this later.
Remember the organisation of the discussion in a paper is the very same as in the thesis.
You should look at the results and discuss or explain them and explain the similarities/ differences within your respondent groups and from that found in the
literature. You will be able to use the results of your cross tabs to explore the characteristics of different respondents. If men or older people gave a different
response to women or youngsters, explain why that might be. Use the literature to do this. You then discuss the potential consequences or implications of these
findings (basically you apply them- in simplest terms, for each of your results you need to ask “So what?”).

A good approach based upon the suggested results organisational idea above is as follows. When you have organised all the results into themes you write the theme on a
large piece of paper and surround it with the results and cross tab results which are relevant to it. It should resemble a spider diagram. Think about the significance
of each of the results regarding the theme and then consider the literature which will explain or contradict each of the results or the theme itself. Start to
construct your discussion about that theme like a story. You will then be able to sequence your statements into a logical discussion linking the results of one
question to the next and bringing in the literature so that in the end you have a co-supporting argument which is cogent and convincing..

7. The Conclusions: The conclusions are the answers to the “So what/” questions. Very often the discussion and conclusion parts are merged as it saves repetition.

8. The Recommendations: The recommendations are then based upon these conclusions. It is like a “to do” list that you might give to the Minister for Food Safety
based upon the research you have done. They are written in a snappy fashion normally,, often numbered or bullet pointed. Usually you will only have 3-7
recommendations. It is one page. There is no discussion about the recommendations normally as you have done all that in (you guessed it!), the discussion/
conclusions.

9. The most common problems with Discussion/ Conclusion/ Recommendation sections: Apart from not putting material into themes (see above), the most common problem
is the inclusion in the discussion of elements which should be elsewhere. Commonly results are repeated without any comment or recommendations are given as part of the
results (this is OK if you title the chapter Discussion, conclusions & recommendations but normally that is inappropriate). Otherwise it becomes repetitive and the
reader loses interest.

To check out how well you have done your discussion/ conclusions/ recommendations sections, re-read those sections and for EACH sentence identify whether each
statement is:

• a result(shouldn’t be there unless followed by a discussion upon it);
• a discussion on a result (correct);
• a discussion on a comparative result from the literature either supporting your findings or explaining why they may be different (correct); For or this you
will have reference so if you do not have many references in the discussion you are don’t it wrong;
• a conclusion based upon that discussion point (correct) ;
• a conclusion unsupported by a result (so find a supporting result or drop it);
• a recommendation NOT based upon one of your conclusions (get rid of it- it must be research based rather than an opinion piece);
• a recommendation based upon one of your conclusions (correct)

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