Writing a Research Article

Abstract

This article provides guidelines for those wishing to write up a piece of research for publication. By convention, the research article usually follows the IMRAD structure – Introduction, Method, Results and Discussion – and this paper presents an outline for the possible content of each of these sections.

Writing for Publication: The Professional Imperative

“…Submissions for publication can take several forms, including letters to the editor, research articles, book reviews, programme descriptions, case histories that were interesting or challenging, guest editorials, brief/short articles, detailed literature reviews on topical issues, opinion pieces or feature columns (Brown 1997, Curtin 1998. In turn, this ensures that the knowledge and innovations generated can be shared with the largest professional audience possible (Drummond 1994, Kelly 1994. James (1990, p57) stated that 'many occupational therapists would like to be able to publish articles about their work, their experiences and their special skills ... unfortunately many occupational therapists do not feel confident about submitting material for publication because they have not been trained as researchers or writers'.…”

“…Strategies that promote writing for publication are listed in Table 1. There are several articles published in the nursing and allied health literature that outline the process of writing for publication, including those by Blancett (1988), Caster (1988), Cusick (1988), Mattsson (1988), Davidhizar (1989), Weiss-Lambrou (1991), Howard (1993), Drummond (1994Drummond ( ,1996, Kelly (1994), Henderson (1995), Ballinger et al (1996), Hayes (1996), Finlay (1997). General guidelines for writing for publication are listed in Table 2.…”

Effective Reporting of Quantitative Data

“…It will not be providing a guide in general as to how to write a paper. Many useful resources already exist for this, including a number published in the British Journal of Occupational Therapy (Kirkman 1992, Kelly 1994, Drummond 1994, Hall 1994, Hayes 1996, Huff 1999, Thomas 2000. This paper complements that of Gissane (1998), which introduced descriptive statistics and included some examples of how to present these.…”