The Best Order to Draft a Research Manuscript

Manuscripts are a critical part of your research. They give you an opportunity to build on previous discoveries and contribute new knowledge to your field.

But writing a manuscript is a big undertaking. After completing your experiments, you now need to write a clear and concise paper that tells a compelling story about your study. This step requires a large investment of time and energy.

Fortunately, you can optimize your time by drafting your manuscript in a certain order. You might be surprised to learn that this order is different from the standard structure found in a research manuscript.

What is the typical structure of a manuscript?

Most scientific journals prefer the IMRAD structure:

Introduction — What is the background of your study?
Methods — How did you conduct your study?
Results — What did you find?
and
Discussion — What do your results mean?

In this structure, the manuscript starts wide in the introduction, narrows at the methods and results, and then widens out again in the discussion and conclusions. Visually, a manuscript takes an hourglass shape:

Although this structure presents a logical flow of ideas to your reader, there is a better order for you to draft your manuscript.

What is the most efficient order to write a manuscript?

A more efficient way to draft a manuscript is to begin with the areas in which you are most familiar: the narrow parts of the structure. Once you write these sections, you will have an easier time writing the more difficult sections.

1. Tables, Figures, and Figure Legends

The first task is to lay out your tables and figures in the best order. This order will likely be different from the order in which you carried out the experiments. You want to arrange your figures in a way that is logical and that tells the best story. And only include figures that support and strengthen the story. This means that you may omit some of your tables or figures—a distressing process for some. This step will also give you an organizational structure to help you write the other sections of the manuscript.

Next, draft your figure legends. Drafting them at this stage will you help you write the methods and results sections of the manuscript.

2. Introduction – Last Paragraph Only

Writing the last paragraph of the introduction will help you frame the story in the manuscript. In this paragraph, state your question, objectives, and hypothesis. This is most important part of your manuscript because everything in the paper should point back to these details.

Resist the temptation to summarize your findings in this paragraph. You don’t want to give away the conclusions of your study before telling the story of your experiments and findings. This information is better to reserve for your discussion.

3. Results

Now that you have your figures in order, you can more easily draft your results section. In this section, describe what you observed and discovered while carrying out your experiments, in the same order you laid out the figures.

The results should include only data and not background or methods. It also should not include any discussion of the presented data. When possible, avoid citing references in this section. Only include them if they support methods that you developed in the study or similar methods that have been reported in the literature.

4. Methods

The methods section follows logically from the previous section and should also be fairly easy to write. Use your figures to dictate the methods that you will include in the manuscript. Because you will likely be most familiar with this part of the project, you will have a much easier time writing this section.

In the methods section, you want to give your reader the details they need to replicate your study. You can do this by clearly describing your study design, the parameters that you measured, and how you measured them.

5. Discussion

After finishing the previous sections, you can more easily craft the discussion. In this section, your main goal is to explain the meaning of your results.

Begin this section with a simple statement of your key findings. Explain whether they are consistent with the objectives and hypothesis that you outlined in the last paragraph of the introduction. If you wish, you can include a brief summary of the main findings of your study as well. Then, explain what your results mean and how they fit into the broader context of your field. How does your study add to the current knowledge? How are your results consistent with or not consistent with other studies? What are the strengths and limitations of your study? What might be some future directions related to your study?

6. Introduction – Remaining Paragraphs

After drafting the discussion, you will have a better idea of the key points of your research project. You will know what background the reader will need to understand your research, including its context within your field and what others have shown. Now, you simply need to fill in the blanks by describing only the information needed for the reader to understand the discussion.

There are three key elements of an introduction. First, you want to introduce the topic by explaining the background and high-level questions or problems that your study aims to address. Remember to include the broader context and how your study fits within that scope. Second, you want to describe the significance of the problem—what is not known and why is it important? And third, you want to describe the rationale, objectives, and hypothesis of your study. This third piece will be part of the last paragraph of your introduction, which you already drafted before you embarked on the discussion.

7. Conclusions

The conclusions are described in the last paragraph of your manuscript. It describes the broader significance of your study. You want to give your reader a clear “take-home message” that explains why your study is important and what impact your discoveries may have on your field or the broader community.

8. Title

At this stage, the title will feel like a final touch on the paper. But the title is one of the most important parts of your manuscript. It gives your paper the greatest visibility by describing the main result of your study in a clear, brief, and specific statement. This statement should contain three key elements: keywords that describe the topic of your article, emphasis on the most important part of your study, and impact words that show the significance of your study.

9. Abstract

The abstract is the most important part of a manuscript. Apart from the title, it is the first thing that readers review to decide whether they want to read the whole article. As a result, the abstract needs to reflect the story and significance of your study. And most importantly, it must attract a reader’s attention and interest. A good abstract is a concise and compelling summary of your study—the background, methods, major findings, conclusions, and significance.

10. References

Thanks to reference-managing software, generating a reference list is a fairly easy process. Some authors still painstakingly write out their references manually. But there are many excellent—even free—programs that you can use to cite references and generate a references list.

A great feature of many software programs is “cite-while-you-write.” With this feature, you can insert citations either as you write each section of your manuscript or after you have finished your final draft. Then you can easily generate your reference list to match the journal requirements with a few simple clicks. And if you decide to change journals at the last minute, you can quickly reformat your entire list with another few clicks.

Putting It All Together

Now that you have drafted each section, you can piece them together in the IMRaD structure to form the first draft of your manuscript. Then you can begin reviewing and revising your text to tell your reader a compelling story about your study.