Mistakes in Brazilian papers are more from concepts than of expression

Abstract

FAPESP Agency -The scientific writing is still the "Achilles heel" of many Brazilian researchers. The mistakes made when writing a thesis or research paper are much more related to problems of research methodology than to lack of ability with words to present the results in a clear, concise and interesting way.The analysis of Gilson Volpato, Professor at Department of Physiology, Institute of Biosciences, Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp), on Botucatu campus, is the sixth revised and expanded edition of the book Ciência: da filosofia à publicação (Original name in Portuguese).Launched in early December, the edition adds four new chapters to the nine of the first edition, published in 1998. One of them presents a brief summary of the history of philosophy in order to explain why science is done as it is today -only accepting conclusions based on empirical evidence (experimentally proved).The idea of this chapter, according to Volpato, is to show the reader the inseparable character from the practice of science and philosophical and theoretical questions, and you can only do good science and write articles for publication in journals of high impact factor when you have a good philosophical training and a very precise understanding of scientific concepts."You must have a very clear understanding of what is doing science to perform good research, resulting in solid articles to be published in high-levels journals. You can not only fix the end of this process -the scientific writing -without having a well-founded basis behind it", said Volpato to FAPESP Agency.Specialist in writing and scientific publication, the authorwho teaches courses in the area and has already helped Brazilian researchers to rewrite more than 250 scientific articles in the field of human, exact and biological knowledges -states that some of the articles published by scientists in Brazil have many structural problems.Among these are introductions that do not fulfill their function, incomprehensible tables, graphs and figures, questionable methods and data that do not support the authors' conclusions but, in most cases, according to Volpato, errors inherent to the present study.