It is said that the people judge a scientific paper by its title, its abstract and its figures. Indeed, if there are no specific interest on author’s name, I would start by looking up on the Internet with some keywords, then select among the search results a number of attractive titles; for each paper, I would read the abstract first, and if it is interesting and related to my work, I will go through the figures and/or jump to conclusion for more detail. Then normally I call it a lecture. No attention is paid to detail if I don’t want to replicate the results presented in the paper.
As a consequence, as author, here are some of my considerations while preparing a paper, listed by their priority.
1st – An attractive title: highlighted keywords and the-most-general-as-possible context.
2st – Abstract: concise and complete, composed by short sentence. Should be mentioned here: the big picture, the most important result should be mentioned, the most promising perspective.
3rd – Figures: I have learn to build a paper around its figures. The figures need to tell the story of the paper by themselves, hence their contain and caption have to be prepared carefully. It is also nice to have an artistic style. Always regroup, because of the limitation by the journals in general, and also for the completeness of the contain, but the legend should by very clear.
4th – Conclusion and Introduction: it can be seen as two faces of the same coin, because normally they have similar structure (context-technique-result). The difference is that in the introduction, one need to emphasize on context, whereas in the conclusion, the results are of most important. One or two sentences about the perspectives are also needed in the conclusion.
5th – Read and read again: if you find your papers interesting, there is a few chance that your readers like it as well, but if you don’t, it is surely sure that no one will ever read it.
