By expanding your outline, you will see which proposed figures/tables are essential, decide what to cut, or realize you might need new ones. Leaving references in comment bubbles next to the text they refer to (shown above) allows you to rearrange the material as much as you like without worrying about updating the reference list every time. Many journals have length restrictions for articles, so if your extensive outline is already approaching that limit before you even get to the full draft, you may need to look at where you can cut back. While the manuscript is still a little low on the detail that readers would want to see, the bullet points are much more specific and are now similar to the phrasing you will use when you turn this into a full draft.Īs you bulk up the content in this way, you’ll start to notice where extra details will be needed, what text might be a bit extraneous, and how it will all come together as a final package. Get your outline to look as close to what your finished manuscript will look like, but in point form.įor example, your methods section could look something like this: That makes things efficient.Īs you expand each bullet point into full sentences and additional bullet points, start creating subheadings. Once you begin a full draft, you should already have all of the key structural and content components in place. This process is also the final stage in which you can still alter the structure if you don’t like it. To do this, you’ll expand on the points you listed in your brief outline – add more details, relevant reference links, and transitions between ideas. The extensive manuscript outlineĪs you might expect, the idea behind an extensive outline is to make it longer. And have your final draft checked for logic and language. You may also need to make some tough decisions on the most essential items to use if your target journal has restrictions on the number of display items, so it’s best to consider them early.Īfter this first step, you can gradually expand your basic outline to become a full first draft before revising it. These may change as you further develop your draft, but they are a vital complement to your text. Figures and tablesĪs part of the outlining process, consider including proposed figures and tables. That’s ok because it’s only the shell of what you plan to create. Your brief outline might only be 30–40 short bullet points when you’re done. The beauty of the outlining process is that it helps you visualize your manuscript’s structure in a very basic form and lets you reorganize discussion points or remove items easily before you’re too deep into the writing. Make bullet points on anything you think might be worth discussing. You had an aim or hypothesis stated at the outset of your study, so then what results are most important to discuss concerning this aim?įor your Discussion, are there any related studies that either support or contradict your results? Were there any patterns or causal factors evident in the results worth discussing in more detail? You’d then proceed in the same way for each following section.įor example, under Methods, what methods did you use to conduct your study? Did you perform statistical analyses? Were any patients enrolled? These are all good subsections to include and are a good place to start building the overall structure of your paper. You can see how we outlined the Introduction, touching on the major discussion points and places where citations are needed. Describe the study population, including the eligibility criteria for enrollmentĭon’t worry about making it long the goal is to keep it short and sweet.State the aim of the study, which was to determine the workplace factors associated with increased stress-related diseases in home-based caregivers.Identify suspected causes of workplace stress.Discuss the lack of information on work-related stressors and that these may go under-reported.Describe previous studies that have attempted to identify lifestyle factors that might contribute to the development of the diseases.Discuss that epidemiological data on the stressors leading to these diseases are limited.Introduce that stress-related diseases are a major contributor to health problems in home-based caregivers.For example, a basic format might look something like this: Use the basic IMRaD structure as your base and flesh it out from there. This technique is called a brief outline. Start with a simple set of bullet points outlining the main items you might want to include in your manuscript. The idea behind drafting an outline is to make things easy for yourself. Key benefits The brief manuscript outline
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