Please register by sending a 100-200 word abstract with subject line 'BREW abstract' to love (at) molgen.mpg.de
Please send your paper submission in ps- or pdf-format (3-5 pages) with subject line 'BREW paper' to love (at) molgen.mpg.de
The BREW workshop is meant to give the participants training in writing scientific papers. The papers should be 3-5 pages, shorter than a normal journal paper. Most journals and conferences will have their own, often very detailed requirements regarding how a paper is to be delivered, but the only requirement for this workshop is that the paper be delivered in the PDF format (however, as a friendly suggestion we'd recommend practicing your LaTeX/BibTeX skills and formatting the paper as a \documentclass[twocolumn]{article}).
The following text covers the most typical sections in a scientific paper presenting a scientific result or method. Looking at the review guidelines when writing your paper can also be helpful, as your paper will be reviewed according to these guidelines. If you present a project plan, your paper does not need to have a result section, and you can either omit this section or comment on what kind of results you expect to get. Review papers will not be expected to have a result section either.
Other researchers read the title and abstract to find out if this paper is interesting to them. Of all the researchers that might read your title in a list of papers, only a fraction will read the abstract, and only a fraction of these will read the paper. Furthermore, the title and abstract are the only things that appear when searching online for scientific papers. All papers submitted to BREW must have a descriptive title and a short abstract, around 100-200 words. The abstract should state what the paper is about and what the main findings of the work are. For this workshop, you should state what type of paper you have written in the abstract.
This section should contain an introduction to the research field. Descriptions and references to the current state in your research field, existing methods and the scientific goal of the work presented are expected. The introduction should be between one half and one page. This is more brief than regular papers, but the introduction is none the less very important, and should contain references to relevant literature in the field, as your reader is not necessarily familiar with your field of research.
The method section should contain a description of the algorithm or method used in the paper, as well as descriptions of the data sets and databases used. Note that the tone of the methods and results sections is markedly different than the introduction and discussion - just check a published paper to get the feel for what language is appropriate in methods and results. How the method or algorithm is to be applied to find the result must also be stated. The descriptions should be sufficiently detailed so that other researchers can reproduce the results presented in the paper.
The results of the paper, preferably as tables and figures, are placed here and should be follow some logical order. All tables and figures should be mentioned in the text of the results. How the results were obtained in reference to the method section should be explained. Here you should use quantitative rather than vague descriptions ("most of the mice were young" replace with "72% of the mice were less than 2 weeks old"). Discussion of the broader meaning of the results should be held off for the next section.
This section should include explanations of the meaning of your results, how your results compare to other methods and the contribution of your methods to the relevant research field. You should discuss the assumptions you have made for the work and the validity of your results, as well as possible problems, objections, or extensions. If there is a disagreement in your field regarding methods or results and their interpretation, you should discuss how this may affect your results and whether your results may affect the disagreement. Discussing these here can only strengthen the argument of the paper.
All your references should be placed at the very end of the paper. Many journals have detailed instructions regarding the format of references, but for BREW we will require no special formatting, only that it is possible to uniquely identify each reference. You should at least include author(s), title, journal and the year of publication in the reference.