Writing a scientific article

     I never thought I had a chance to write a scientific article, because in my view, people who can write scientific articles only can be professors or researchers who are very knowledgeable and experienced in some fields. However, the Ales class told me “No.”. Hence, I got this assignment, writing a scientific article, from the class. This was my first time, I was nervous but excited.

     I went through all the topics and their requirements. Finally I chose option one, Open Access, as my topic, because it gave the questions for every section so that it could be easier to summary and organize information that I have to search. This article was separated to five sections, Introduction, Background, Impacts, Possibilities and Conclusion. At the beginning, I was confused about introduction and background parts since I thought what these two contained were almost same. But when I further checked these two parts, I found that the background part should be more relevant than the introduction part since the contents of background are richer. For instance, background contains the history of open access, interesting facts, the current issues this movement faced and so on. Thanks to the questions, I finished every section smoothly because I can catch the key points to search what I want. However, also because of these questions, my article looked like answering questions. So, I spent some time organizing it which made each paragraph can be connected very naturally. After I finished writing, I put the whole contents of article in the Wordle website and got this beautiful word clouds. Here is the picture.

Zhou,F.(2012).Open access in Wordle.Retrieved on April 10,2012  http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7200/7066675199_8aed931933_c.jpg

     
     However, there was one part we cannot forget, which is the Reference. Refer to the reference; searching information is the basic but essential step in the writing. Wikipedia is a useful searching website, but it could not be academic enough to support the article. Therefore, I chose to look up peer-reviewed articles that helped me finish the writing and I found the U of A library website was a good source to obtain peer-reviewed articles. After finishing the contents of article, I started to reference. APA style is the citing method for scientific articles. I checked Purdue OWL website and it assisted me to cite each reference properly. After adding reference to the article, I felt that the article had been more academic. 
     In summary, writing a scientific article is a strict process. From this assignment, what I learned is not only how to write a scientific article but also how to search academic information which is properly related to our research and how to cite the reference. These two essential steps are the keys to write a good scientific article. Finally, I want to introduce my friend Yunke Xu's blog, and we have similar name for the blog. She will have a Pecha Kucha presentation on Friday. Good luck!