Transportation Seminar Series
Practical Tips for Journal-Style Scientific Writing

April 13, 2007

Different from research reports, scientific papers published in most journals are required to undergo a peer review process. Therefore, how to write a high-quality scientific paper is critical to disseminate the research to your discipline. Even if you do an excellent research, failure to present your results effectively will impair the quality of your research and your contributions to the knowledge in your field. In this seminar, I will mainly cover three aspects of scientific writing.

First, I will present the general: structure (format) of a scientific paper including sections from the title to appendix. Further, I will discuss how to write literature review and a review paper. The final section covers careless citation practices and plagiarism.

Xinyu (Jason) Cao, Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute – NDSU

Xinyu (Jason) Cao is an associate research fellow at Small Urban & Rural Transit Center, Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute. He received his M.S. in Statistics and PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Davis. His major advisor, Dr. Patricia Mokhtarian, has very strict standards on scientific writing, and passed on to him tips to improve technical writing. His website is at: www.ndsu.edu/ndsu/xinyu/