Guidelines for writing Technical

documents in Psychological research

Krishna Prasad Miyapuram

0. The aim of this document is to provide a general overview for research students on technical
writing and are comments based on the author’s experience. There are no hard rules and
the authors should refer to the instructions for authors of the journal to be considered for
peer-review carefully before submission.
1. The format of a technical article is as follows: Abstract, Introduction, Materials and Methods,
Results, Discussion, References and acknowledgements. The recommended order of writing
is as follows: first materials and methods should be written. This is the most straight-forward
and keeps the document flow, overcomes any writer’s block, and ensures that any details
are not missed, Second results section forms the main body of the text, the discussion needs
to compare the results with other literature, and introduction needs to be tuned in line with
discussion and finally the abstract will summarize everything. Special care should be taken to
avoid confusing terminology, technical terms should be used consistently, all abbreviations
must be expanded on their first use and consistent use of American or British spellings must
be made. It is recommended that the article be written by the lead author (the first author
who has mainly conducted the research) in conjunction with the other authors. The senior
author (the last author) of the paper is usually the supervisor of research. Before sending for
peer-review the manuscript should be checked for spelling and grammatical mistakes. The
best way to do a final check is to take a print out and read it marking the required
corrections. The automatic checking by word processors should not be used as any mis-spelt
word could have been replaced by another correctly spelt word. The research is usually
described in past tense. It is strongly recommended to get comments from colleagues not
involved directly in research as they can easily point out what is obvious for the researchers
may not be understood well by the readers. In general, there are three groups of audience
for any research. The first group is the authors themselves, the second group is peer
reviewers and the third group is the outside research world. It is the outside research world
that is the target of the article. This group can be further put into three categories – other
research groups specialized in your field, in related fields, and in unrelated fields. The last
category is the most difficult audience to explain your research. The article needs to be
written with a proper mix explaining all non-standard terminology to appeal to the broader
audience.
2. The abstract should contain the summary of everything in the document i.e. it should briefly
introduce the topic in no more than 2 sentences, explain the experimental procedures, again
in 2 to 3 sentences, and the most important of all, the abstract should drag the attention of
the readers to the key results from their research. The abstract is a sort of bait to engage the
reader to read the entire article. Further, public databases index the abstracts and the
abstracts are made widely available. So abstract is a critical piece of the entire article. The
abstract should end with 1 or 2 sentences with the take-home message. The recommended
length of abstract for a full-length paper is typically 250 words. In general the abstract
 should not have any references or citations. In exceptional cases, the citations can be
allowed, which should be expanded in full.
3. The introduction should typically consist of three parts without any subheadings. The first
paragraph should put the broader context or the big picture of the current research and
filter it down to the focus point of current research. The intermediate paragraphs should do
a brief review of literature. The literature review should proceed with typically two
sentences per article being referred to. The first should mention what was investigated and
the second should mention what were their main findings. The last paragraph of
introduction should contain the shortcomings of the previous research and how the current
study contributes to fill in a gap in existing literature. The introduction should end with the
main hypotheses being tested in the current research.
4. The materials and methods should typically have sub-headings and have clear mention of
the sample, stimuli, experimental design, experimental procedures, and data analysis. The
sample should describe the size of population, sample characteristics such as demographic
information and representativeness of the sample. There should be a mention about ethical
conduct of research, particularly if involving biological samples. The stimuli section should
describe the equipments and materials used. The experimental design should have a clear
link with the hypotheses being tested in the experiment. However, the actual testing of
hypothesis should be described only in the data analysis part. The experimental procedures
involve the practical and physical settings of the experiment and should describe how the
experiment was carried out. What were the instructions to participants, if any. Was any
training involved to participants and so on? The data analysis should describe the key
measurements or variables that are taken as the outcome of the experiment. How are these
variables calculated from the actual observations. The statistical model used to analyze the
data and the statistical tests being done on the data. Whether there were any planned
comparisons in view of the hypotheses being tested as mentioned in introduction?
5. The results section is the main body of the text. If any figures and tables are used, these
should be prepared first together with legends. Each legend should sufficiently describe the
contents of the figure and the reader should be able to decipher the key message without
having to resort to referring back to the text of the article. The preparation of figures needs
special care conforming to the requirements of journal. Often the charts / graphs should be
formatted to be black and white. The line styles and marker combinations should be used to
make clear distinction between categories of a chart. When presenting any data, these
should be statistically correct e.g. use of error bars in graphs etc. Colour should be used only
when necessary as many journals have the policy to charge extra for printing colour figures
and only print colour when it is necessary. The results section should describe the outcomes
of the statistical tests mentioned in the data analysis subsection of materials and methods.
However, care must be taken to avoid pure statistical descriptions and instead these should
be translated into the language of the hypothesis. E.g. we found that the average height of
girls is greater than boys (T(d.f.)=,p<) is a better description than saying that we found
significant interaction between gender and height (T(d.f.)=,p<). The results section usually
follows the logical order of figures and tables but there should not be a pure repetition in
the text and figure legends, although some overlap is unavoidable. The text must cite or
refer to all the figures and legends. The results section should usually be comprehensive and
many times the key findings are described in detail. The peripheral findings are either
 omitted or limited to brief mention and can often be included in appendix or supplementary
information. In the results section, there should not be any interpretations of the results,
which are supposed to be done in the discussion. It is recommended to use sub-headings to
improve clarity of results. Reference to previous literature should be avoided as far as
possible in the results section.
6. The discussion section should begin with a brief summary of the main results and highlight
the novel findings. The discussion can have sub-headings and if possible (but not necessarily)
these can correspond to the sub-headings in the results section. Each paragraph in
discussion should be limited to one point. The general style of paragraph should be followed
i.e. the starting sentence should mention the topic being discussed and the ending sentence
should conclude that point. The intermediate sentences form the body of that paragraph
which should have two components – one, what previous research has found, two, what
current research has found and the explanation for agreement or disagreement between
the two. The discussion section should contain the limitations of the current study and
directions for future research. The last paragraph of discussion usually would highlight the
novel contributions of the current study in the bigger picture as set out in the first paragraph
of introduction. The discussion section can optionally have a conclusion paragraph. The
conclusion is a different style compared to the abstract and can have more details on results
and discussion points (including limitations and future directions), but introductory and
experimental descriptions do not have a place in conclusion.
7. References and citations should follow the format requirements of the journal. Many
journals only accept peer-reviewed or other scholarly references to be included. All
references must be cited and all citations must be referenced.
8. The article should include an acknowledgement section mentioning the funding bodies and
thanking individuals that helped the research.