HOW TO SET UP, CONDUCT AND REPORT A SCIENTIFIC STUDY
Original Articles
Figure 5. Analysis of Variance( ANOVA) of flexural strength of Zirconia specimen bars as influenced by surface grinding( surface) and heat treatment( heat). Note that heat has not a significant influence but surface condition has. There are no significant interactions.
Figure 6a. Example of reporting parametric data as bar graphs with standard deviation. Tensile strength of composite bonded to two ceramics after different cleaning procedures of saliva contaminated ceramics.
is high. All the recommendations given above to write the“ Introduction” and“ Materials & Methods” apply of course. There are a few more however. The working title must be now converted into the final title of the publication. Some journals limit the number of words. A title is the first thing a potential reader sees. Therefore it should be appealing and motivate the reader to continue. The title should:
• Be concise, precise
• Adequately represent the contents of the article
• May not promise something it can not deliver
• Must specify animal species / clinical, in vivo / in vitro, methodology Key words must be assigned to the paper. The authors sequence is a topic that often raises conflicts, despite the fact that the rules about who should be where are obvious. 20 Only persons who have contributed to a significant degree scientifically / intellectually to the paper are included in the author line. Other contributions can be accounted for in the Acknowledgements at the end of the paper. Each author should know the article and be able to take on scientific responsibility for it. Who had the most scientific / intellectual input should be the first author. Conflicts may occur in mentor-student situations. My personal view here is that the amount of contribution of the student should determine whether he / she is first author or not. If the idea came from the student, the mentor helped and advised, the student performed the experiment and wrote the manuscript( even with help of the mentor), then it is clear that the student is the first author. On the other hand, if the idea and the experimental design are from the mentor, the student performed the experiment, but the mentor wrote the manuscript, then the mentor should deserve the first place in the author’ s list. To avoid conflicts more and more journals require disclosure of the contribution of every author. The next thing to write is the " Abstract ". This is a difficult task for many reasons. Very often the journal guidelines restrict its number of words and imply a specific structure. The abstract must summarize in a very condensed form the objective, what was done, how it was done and the results. Usually a conclusion is the final point of an abstract. It is important to include the statistics and hard numbers of the results.
96 Stoma Edu J. 2017; 4( 2): 90-101 http:// www. stomaeduj. com