Guidelines to Write a Scientific Document

Choosing the tense

When describing an analysis it is difficult to keep track of what happened when. There is usually no time line what is done first, next and last, and even if there is such a thing it is rarely of relevance to the analysis.

Therefore choose one tense and use it consistently throughout the document. The choice is either past tense or present tense. It turns out that present tense is usually simpler to use and should be preferred. As usual there are exception to the rules. Example: when writing up a Run II analysis it is appropriate to refer to the actions performed in a similar Run I analysis in past tense.

Conditional terms

The idea of a scientific publication is to describe facts and conclude as logical and coherently as possible.

Therefore the use of conditional clauses should be avoided at all cost. Words like may, can, would, could, should, might etc. are to be avoided. Usually an analysis follows a strategy and does not need to discuss what can, should or would happen if.

Slang / Colloquial

dunno, don't and can't are NOT appropriate for scientific texts. do not know, do not and cannot are the correct terms.

Abbreviations

Before using technical abbreviations introduce them. Abbreviations are nice as they can make your text more compact but they can also make it unreadable. It is very important to ensure the reader can follow and does not need to go back to find out what the abbreviations mean. Therefore you might want to introduce abbreviations which you use rarely several times in the text. Then you might on the other hand be better off not to use this particular abbreviation.

Keep in mind: it is bad style to start a phrase with an abbreviation or with a number or symbol.

Figures / Tables / References / Equations

If you want to refer to figures, tables, references or equations which have a number attached to them use capitalized terms like Table 1 or Equation 2.5 etc.

Some people like to use abbreviations like: Tab. 1. In case you want to use those do it consistently throughout your text. In my mind the text is more readable if you write the full word.

For references there is one additional rule. In case you do not explicitly use the reference as part of your text just use the number otherwise you have to add the term Reference explicitly.

Example: The GEANT simulation package [1] is great. The GEANT simulation package described in Reference [1] is great.

Every figure/table/reference has to be referred to in the text otherwise it is not useful to keep it in the document. It is a good policy to make the caption of the figure/table as detailed as it is needed for the reader to understand the figure/table without reading the complete text. This is very useful as people want to grab figures for conferences and need to know all detail about the figure but they do not need to go through the text to understand th figure. Typically special cut values used to produce the figure should be quoted exp licitly.

Sections / Subsections and so on

Choose a title which is short and characterizes what the section is supposed to describe. A section marks the beginning of a new unit and it is therefore important that the text without having read the title of the section makes sense. As a rule of thumb the contents of the section title is usually repeated in the first sentence.

References and larger documents

Often people do not pay attention to the proper ordering of their references. It is important that references appear strictly ordered in your document because it facilitates the reading and searching through the references significantly.

In a larger document like a thesis it is desirable to even document very general concepts like the Standard Model, Quantum Chromo Dynamics (QCD) or CP violation. The reference cannot be a text book which explains them but has to be the original first publication of the idea, which is important to give credit to the people who did the work. In most cases there is a set of well agreed upon references for these big topics.

In a thesis document it should be natural that those big references come first as the text is likely to be structured accordingly. If you find some obscure and not so important references appear first in your list of references it is likely that your introduction is not very coherent.

List of figures and list of tables

Latex allows one with a simple statement to include the list of figures and the list of tables in the document. While this is very nice at times it is easy to forget that very often the long captions given in the figures and tables are not appropriate for these lists. Latex allows one to maintain a short description and a long description for the caption. The short description is used in the list of tables/figures. The syntax is very simple:

\caption[short description]{long description}

Only after careful review of the caption those lists should be included. In my opinion those lists are rarely used and I recommend to not include them in a thesis.

Footnotes

The very definition of a footnote is that you could completely drop it and the text is still entirely understandable and has all relvent information. Footnotes are related but not essential information. It is very common to have footnotes in philosophy of other human arts publications, it is not common in scientific documents.

Punctuation

Punctuation is tricky and therefore simply constructed sentences have a big advantage. One thing is certain, a semicolon is something you should avoid using because it is in most cases not properly used.