Writing Tips for ATOC5051: Paper Preparation for Geophysics Students - Prof. Baylor Fox-Ke, Study notes of Oceanography

Download Writing Tips for ATOC5051: Paper Preparation for Geophysics Students - Prof. Baylor Fox-Ke and more Study notes Oceanography in PDF only on Docsity! Tips on Paper Writing for ATOC5051 1 Contacts The professor for this class is: Baylor Fox-Kemper bfk@colorado.edu 303-492-0532 Office: Ekeley room S250B http://cires.colorado.edu/science/groups/foxkemper/classes 2 Getting Help! I am usually available by email. You can also come to me from 2-5 Tuesday or Thursday or by appointment other times. If you are having trouble with the writing, there are lots of places to find help! You can make an appointment at the writing center.1 You also might ask last year’s students for tips. You can see examples of their best work in the proceedings.2 I’ve put my favorite writing style guides in the bibliography (Turabian, 2007; Strunk et al., 2005; Montgomery , 2003). 3 General Comments on Papers Before you get worried about writing five papers for one class, let me explain the goals of the paper writing. These are not supposed to be polished, ready to submit papers detailing years of research. Instead, they are supposed to be practice in writing drafts for your real research. The idea is to get used to pounding out a working draft in only a couple of hours, so that when the time comes for you to do it for real, that part will be easy. 3.1 AGU formats and templates We will be writing all of the papers according to the style, page length, and guidelines of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) journal: Geophysical Research Letters (GRL). GRL is geophysics’ own version of Nature or Science, and it contains only very short focused articles (4 pages, usually 4 figures or fewer). I chose this journal because it has very clear guidelines for formatting and reviews, as well as an online article length checker that we can borrow! Regardless of your specialization, you will probably have an opportunity to write a GRL paper in the near future, so this will be good practice. 3.2 Abstracts: What are they and do you need them? You need to have an abstract on every paper. It is a summary of what you’ve done, with enough detail that a reader can decide whether your paper has what they need or not in it, and they can quickly refresh their memory as to which paper of yours it is, too! It’s the first thing after the title and authors’ names. Imagine doing a google scholar search for a keyword when you are working on one of these papers. For example, ”North Atlantic Deep Water” input to scholar.google.com just got 6,590 hits, so how do you sort through them? 1) The number of citations generally tells you if it is a useful and/or a controversial treatment. 2) You read the titles, 3) You skim the abstract, 4) you skim the figures, reading the captions only. You should write your title, abstract, and captions for this audience: someone skimming a mess of papers on a related topic trying to find the particular treatment or fact that they need without reading all of the papers. 1http://www.colorado.edu/PWR/writingcenter.html 2http://cires.colorado.edu/science/groups/foxkemper/classes/ATOC5051 07/proceedings 1 3.3 Graphics A figure should be included inside the text just after the figure is mentioned in the text. It makes for easier reading with figures on same page as discussion.3 (Note: every figure deserves at least one sentence of explanation in the text!) Every figure should have a caption, which should be short but detailed enough. Just like writing the title and abstract for the skimmer, write the figure caption so that by reading just the title, abstract, and figure captions gains an outline of the work. 3.4 Acknowledgements: Pay and Friends Over time, the acknowledgements has become a place to state who paid for the research (you’ll notice journal articles with acknowledgments that begin ’This research was funded under NSF...’). So, you can begin with this if you like, e.g., ’This research was funded under a G.R.A. sponsored by (insert advisor/dept. here)’. More importantly, if you talked to classmates or other teachers, and they gave you a good idea it is good to mention them here for two reasons: 1) It is a nice way to recognize their help, and 2) it closes the door on plagiarism. What I mean by 2) is, if you state that someone helped you in some regard, then they can’t say that you ’stole’ the idea from them. Instead, you just borrowed it, with adequate acknowledgement. 3.5 A Special Role for Facts Because of the special role for facts in the scientific method, scientific papers must be very careful when dealing with statements of fact. There are three ways to make a factual statement in a paper. You can: 1. Prove it (in data or analysis) 2. Cite it (and pass the buck to another source) 3. Speculate it (and clearly indicate you’re doing so) If you aren’t sure which one you’re doing, you aren’t allowed to make the statement, at least not in a scientific paper. For example, if you are trying to make a point like, ”The oxygen content of NADW is anomalously high.” You can 1) make a figure, 2) cite a source, or 3) hypothesize that it should be high because the NADW was recently near the surface (where it equilibrated with the atmosphere) and then sunk quickly below the depths of important biological activity. Or, if it is an important point, you can do all three! 3.6 Citations: When and Why? Citations are a bit like the acknowledgements in that they shield you from plagiarism, but they also serve another equally important role: they allow you to pass the buck to another author/work who has proven it elsewhere. 3.6.1 How to do citations in LATEXwith BibTeX LATEX has a sister program called BiBTeX, which processes a database of *.bib files to extract and label the citations you use within a particular paper. In the atocsample.tex file that I provided, there is also an atocbibliography.bib file that has some useful references for the class. If you want to add another one, just cut and paste one of the existing ones, and edit it. For example, the first reference in the database *.bib file is: 3In LATEX, use preprint rather than draft. 2