Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

I HAVE BEEN DOING EXPERIMENTS ON THE EFFECT OF SALICYLIC ACID ON GERMINATION OF MAIZE SEED, i WOULD LIKE TO WRITE UP A PAPER ON THE RESULTS.
WHERE COULD I GET HELP

Hi jbrazil,
That sounds like an interesting experiment, what effects on the maize seed did you find? What kind of paper were you planning in writing up with your results? Let me know what you are thinking and I can help you with some more information or links.

Thanks for your response.
.
( SA = Salicylic acid) 50ppm gave the best results
I primed maize seeds in different concentrations of SA to find out which concentration gave the best germination
results when the seeds were under stress.
This is an open forum and i am worried about giving to many results.
Thanks for your help

I would like to write a science paper

Hi,

Typically papers are very thorough in describing the results and effects that they see. From my understanding of what you have described, this is a great start but you will likely need more data to support some sort of mechanism for how salicylic acid improves growth, esp during the stress response. As a next step, I would recommend trying to get into a lab that focuses on this sort of plant research and developing your project further, measuring more variables correlated with growth and trying to determine how salicylic acid is improving growth and durability. From there, usually the head of the lab will decide that the results are good enough to be publishable and will be able to further help you develop the writing.

I am working in a lab and to date done 46 experiments using salicylic acid and also sea weed extracts, over the past two years.
I would like to complete this project myself by getting it down on paper in a scientific format before producing it to my team leader.
could you help.
JB

Hi,

So it depends on the PI how he/she wants papers to get done; from my experience, my PIs have preferred I show them convincing figures and a plausible story before they want me to write anything up. I would start by making nice figures and some sort of Abstract/Intro, and then ask them how he/she wants to proceed. I would recommend talking to your PI for more details though.

Hi,

Like aaron said, PIs generally like to have papers written their way and have specific pet peeves and a specific format about different things.

If you still want to write a paper without consulting the PI, there are some websites that talk about how to write scientific papers.

http://abacus.bates.edu/~ganderso/biolo ... tions.html

In fact, you can even go on pubmed, search up some papers related to your topic, and see how they organize their results section.

Hopoe that helps!

-Sam