Expectations of A-grade paper in STEM

[hippyscientist]

I've been reading quite a few old threads, with regards to your own graduate work and also the grading of undergraduate assignments. One thing that keeps cropping up is the quality of an A-grade paper. Would someone mind explaining to me what the general expectation of an A-grade would be in a STEM field? I haven't had A/B/C grading in higher education and equally the grading levels are quite challenging to decipher. I was just wondering what a top-end research paper would encompass - broadly speaking of course. If it's easier to specify for your own field please do, this is just a general curiosity question!

[shadowclaw]

Over the years, I've personally learned to write an A-grade research paper by emulating what I see in journal articles to the best of my ability. So that's the number one piece of advice I can give you for learning how to do it. Read papers in your field and pay attention to the writing style, and pay particular attention to the introduction and discussion, as these are areas that are easy to fill with unnecessary or extra information.

As for what actually goes into a research good paper, here's my two cents as an ecologist. For the introduction, you want to provide a good background to set the stage for your research, but you also don't want it to be sprawling. When reviewing past research, make sure you include relevant papers (and be sure to look for papers that have contradictory results so that your review isn't one-sided), but don't try to cite every paper ever written about the subject and remember to have a critical eye when reviewing. The goal is to briefly summarize past research relevant to your study. Also, keep your audience in mind when writing - if you are writing for a more general audience, you might need a bit more information in order to bring the reader up to speed on different concepts and terms, while a paper targeted for a specialized audience can skip over this kind of information.

I've always found methods easy to write, but just make sure you are concise but have all the information necessary to repeat the study, and be sure to describe your statistical analysis well. Results can sometimes be tricky for people to write up, because I've found that my peers often fall into a redundancy trap or want to put information into tables or figures that would better placed in the text. Don't be redundant with information - don't put the same information in two places (see what I did there?). If your data fits nicely into table and makes the most sense in a table, put it there and don't also make a chart that shows the same information just because you think the paper needs a figure. If you can report your results briefly in the text, don't put together a space-taking figure. It seems like common sense, but I've seen too many papers where students put the same data in multiple places or wasted space with a table or figure when they could have reported their results as one line of text.

The discussion is another area that can easily become sprawling. You might want to compare every little result of your study to every other study out there, and that's just going to take up too much space. Yes, you want to address all of your results, but you want to spend the most time and space on the results that show us something important. You also want to make sure you explain how your results fit into the big picture and expand our knowledge. Do more than say "this is cool." Say why it's cool, and be critical of both your own research and that of others. Talk about how your results can be applied and why we should care. Write about future directions for the research to go.

Review-style papers are a somewhat different beast, but generally follow the same principles. You define a topic that you want to explore, report the results, and discuss.  You find out what information is out there and then figure out what questions the research doesn't answer. You point out strengths and weaknesses of the studies and recommend what we need to do to fill in the gaps in the knowledge. I've read some pretty bland literature reviews that regurgitated what was in the studies and didn't treat them with a critical eye. It's one thing to just summarize literature - it's another thing to review it. You need to show some critical thinking, or else your paper will end up like a glorified annotated bibliography.