科学动词：让它们发挥作用
Hello There! Welcome to the blog. I am one of the editors at Pro Article Experts and this is the first blog post! We have created this blog with the purposes of compiling how we have learned to write articles more effectively and scientifically, and also making the information more accessible to people in need, especially those non-native English-speaking students and researchers. We hope this blog will be helpful to you!
I thought about writing my first blog on “Fundamentals of Scientific Writing”, which in my opinion include IMRaD[1] formatting, tense, active vs. passive voice, subject and verb connections, tables and figures, citations, correct-clear-coherent-concise-convincing strategies, etc. However, my experience infers that it would be ineffective without having a solid vocabulary foundation and a rich bank of useful phrases. Hence on this blog I am going to follow the ordering of words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs before I write about big picture fundamentals. Of course, along the five steps, I will touch on tense, active voice, other topics.
So, let’s start with words. What type of word is the most important in scientific writing? I am sure you know it. Without a doubt, it is the verb. Verb is a word used to describe an action, state, or occurrence, and forming the main part of the predicate of a sentence, such as explore, examine, observe. We all need to use powerful verbs in our scientific writing. I strongly believe: If you want to get good at writing, you need to learn from the best writers. On this blog, I will take examples from some of the most cited scholars and show how they write effectively and scientifically. Since I am familiar with Engineering, Mechanics, Earth Science disciplines so I will (biasedly) select renowned scientists from these fields. I am sorry if your research area is not among these, but the principles still apply. Today I am going to show you the verbs used in an article entitled “Isogeometric analysis: CAD, finite elements, NURBS, exact geometry and mesh refinement” published in Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering by Hughes et al. in 2005[2]. In addition to the research breakthrough, this is a well written article, which has been cited by 4,047 times (google scholar) as of today. Prof. Hughes is a leading expert in computational mechanics [3], with a total citation over 100,000 (google scholar). In this article, about 145 different verbs were used, as listed in Table 1 on this post. These are all scientific verbs that can be used when you write your next article. I hope you can save the table or create your own table for future use.
Thank you visiting my blog. I hope you have learned a thing or two from this post. In my next post, I will categorize these and other impressive verbs into different classes. Stay tuned!
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[1] IMRaD: In scientific writing, IMRaD (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) is a common organizational structure (a document format).
[2] Hughes, T. J., Cottrell, J. A., & Bazilevs, Y. (2005). Isogeometric analysis: CAD, finite elements, NURBS, exact geometry and mesh refinement. Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, 194(39-41), 4135-4195.