Many of the papers that students in the graduate program in analytical chemistry at Umass Amherst will write will conform to the following format. The instructions for authors should be consulted for relevant details; for example, not all journals require the inclusion of key words. Some journals have numbered subheadings, and some have different levels indicated by upper case letters, and italic and bold fonts. The contents of the paper can be broken down into the following parts.

Title
Names and addresses of authors
Abstract
Key words
Introduction
Experimental
Results and Discussion
Conclusions
Acknowledgments
References
Tables
Captions for figures
Figures

The text of the paper should be constructed as a continuous narrative with page breaks after "key words" and "acknowledgments", so that the "introduction" and "references" each start on a new page. Each table should be on a separate page, as should the list of figure captions and each figure. All the pages (with the possible exception of the first, title page) should be numbered.

Title

The title should be as informative as possible without being too long (probably not more than 35 words), it should not contain any acronyms or abbreviations. The information should include the analyte(s), the matrix (i.e. what the sample material is) and the major instrumental technique used for quantification and anything that is novel about the sample pretreatment procedures. For example.

Determination of arsenic in soil by flow injection hydride generation electrothermal atomization atomic absorption spectrometry: evaluation of sample pretreatment by accelerated solvent extraction and supercritical fluid extraction

Remember that analytes are determined and sample materials (matrices) are analyzed.

Names and addresses of authors

Check the journal requirements for format. Issues to note include whether one or more authors have different work addresses, whether one or more authors are now located at a different address, whether the journal uses first names in full, and whether e-mail addresses are required. Note also how the journal handles the country and any zip or post code. Often details such as this are not given in the instructions for authors and a recent issue of the journal should be consulted.

Abstract

This is best written after the rest of the manuscript has been assembled. It is often done poorly by authors, and it is inadvisable to use examples from recent journal issues. The abstract should be more than just a summary, which is often not very informative. If for example, in the abstract for the paper whose title is given above the authors wrote, "A systematic evaluation of the relevant operating parameters (time, temperature, pressure and the nature of the solvent) was made, and the percentage recoveries from a number of soil samples (including some standard reference soils) were measured", the reader is not really any better informed. A moment's thought following reading the title would lead the reader to deduce that any sensible study with this title must have involved the work just described in the abstract. What is needed are the results of the experimental work. The values of the operating parameters should be given together with the composition of the solvent, the numbers of samples, the identity of the SRMs and values for the percent recoveries. It should not be necessary for the reader to have to look in the paper to find the important results or any important novel features of the experimental work and it should be quite clear what instrumentation or instrumental techniques were used. Every year there are many review articles written about recent developments in certain fields of analytical chemistry. Given that the numbers of papers is large (the annual literature in analytical atomic spectrometry is well in excess of 5,000 publications), authors of review articles may work only from the abstract of the papers to be included in the review. It is important therefore that the important results are clearly stated in the abstract.

Key words

Often key phrases are allowed. The need for key words is diminishing, as many data bases allow searching on the words in the title and abstract, and searches on just the key words are becoming obsolete.

Introduction

Normally, there should be three distinct parts to the introduction. There should be a summary of the recent relevant published work. There should be concise statements of what the need for further developments is, i.e. what are the shortcomings or limitations of the previously published procedures, and there should be a short statement as to what the manuscript contains that is new and useful, and is being presented as the basis for consideration for publication. If the manuscript contains new theoretical material, this should be presented in the "introduction".

Experimental

There will be several sections. The first two will be a description of the equipment and apparatus used and the second will be a list of chemicals. The optimized operating parameters of any major instrument might be listed in a table and a further table might list the optimized sample pretreatment parameters. Any key pieces of equipment might be described with the aid of a schematic diagram.

Following these sections will typically be a section entitled "method development". This should start with a discussion of what parameters are expected to be important and how they might influence the relevant figure(s) of merit and to what extent these parameters might be interactive. This should be followed by a statement concerning the optimization procedure which was used and a statement explaining why this particular procedure was adopted. This particularly important if a single-cycle alternating variable search of the factor space was used as, in general, this method is not an efficient search algorithm and is considered an inappropriate experimental design by referees. This section should describe the experiments in which the various relevant parameters were varied and give the limits of the search in each dimension and the step size.

The next section should be entitled "method validation". This section might include a sub-section relating to "analytical performance", in which details of the calibration procedure would be given, of the measurement of detection limit, precision and any other factors needed to describe the method's performance (methods concerned with chromatography might include the calculation of plate numbers and resolutions). The method validation would include a description of any spike recovery experiments, of any standard additions calibrations, analysis of reference materials, of comparison of the results of analyses by anther method and so on. Descriptions of the statistical tests used would be included here.

There should be enough information in all of these sections to allow the work to be repeated by personnel in another research group.

Results and Discussion

This section should parallel the "experimental" section, particularly with regard to the contents of the method development and method evaluation sections. Most likely the bulk of the figures and tables will be in this section. Journals are reluctant to publish papers with more than six figures. Straight line plots can usually be omitted and the results of the regression summarized in the text. The results of any statistical significance tests should be given in objective language and should not be summarized as "in good agreement with" or other similar phrases. Any disagreement with previously published results should be pointed out and discussed (some reasons suggested for the differences), and any inconsistencies in the results should be similarly discussed.

Conclusions

This section is not always necessary. The important conclusions may already have been stated in the discussion of the results. This section can be used to indicate what further work is planned and it is a place where explanations can be proposed for discrepancies in results (though these may have already been adequately discussed in the previous section). Often authors write “conclusions” that are really summaries. There is a simple test for whether what you write is a conclusion or not: put the words “it is concluded that” in front of any statements; if the resulting sentence makes sense, than what you have written is probably a conclusion.

Acknowledgments

This section may not be needed, but remember that many funding agencies require some form of acknowledgement and it may be politic to acknowledge financial support, and/or loan/donation of equipments or substantial help with aspects of the experimental work. This section should be brief.

References

Be sure to adopt the current journal format. From time to time journals change the required format so look at a very recent copy or consult the instructions for authors. Note that some journals require inclusive pagination and some require the titles of the articles. It is a bad idea to submit a manuscript to a journal in which the references are in another journal’s format, as it is usually interpreted as an indication that the paper has already been submitted to another journal and rejected.

Tables
Captions for figures
Figures

Any tables should follow the reference section, with each table on a separate page. Each table should be numbered and given a title. Usually Roman numerals are used, for example the first table might be titled as follows.

Table 1 Optimized instrument operating parameters

The detail of the spacing punctuation and capitalization would depend on the particular journal.

Then a list of figure captions should appear on a separate sheet. Each caption should conform, as far as possible, to the style of the journal to which the manuscript is to be submitted. For example,

Fig. 1 Schematic diagram of flow injection apparatus used.

Captions to figures should contain enough information to make the figure understandable without the reader needing to go back to the text to find information. Chromatograms should contain all the relevant information about how they were obtained (stationary phase and dimensions, mobile phase composition and gradient, column dimensions, sample volume, temperature and/or temperature program)