Some questions you should ask before writing your paper for Journals are:

• Why should readers be interested in this paper?

• What does the article add to existing literature?

• Will it be of interest to a broad readership?

• Does the method succeed? What are its failings and why?

• Is it marginal requiring other input for success?

• What is its regime of applicability?

• Are there major practical limitations, for example cost, to an otherwise ideal approach?

Is there any superfluous material which dilutes your message? Methods described elsewhere should be referenced in the text rather than repeated. Is there material which should be included which would strengthen the paper? Serial publications where the authors describe incremental advances in their work are not encouraged.

The ideal of brevity does not mean that clear statements of purpose and conclusion, and of sufficient background to interest the general reader, must be sacrificed. On the contrary, in many manuscripts they are frequently the only sections which merit significant expansion. Also to have interest to a general readership, some motivating background is almost always necessary.

When writing your paper you should consider the structure and how you will present your research

Abstract

This is often the last part of the paper to be written. It should be suitable for use by abstracting and indexing services so should include all the keywords which would help a reader locate your article from an abstracts database. It should also state clearly what you have achieved and what is described in your paper. Many readers decide whether to retrieve the full paper solely after reading the abstract, so this should highlight the key results of your work.

Keywords

Authors are asked to supply suitable keywords as a concise method of describing the general topic of research. Specific keywords should be placed after the abstract and should include the measurand under investigation, the equipment and techniques used, as well as possible applications of the work.

Introduction

This should contain a brief summary of the state of the art, and demonstrate to the reader how your work is an advance in current knowledge

Questions should be answered such as:

• Why should people be interested in your work? Why should they read your paper?

• What is the motivation for the work?

• What is the relevance?

• To whom is it relevant?

• Who is the audience for this paper? (For publication in a broad based journal, it is often worth stating this explicitly)

• What has been done before in this field?

• How does your work enhance the state of current knowledge? For this you may have to give a brief outline to the reader on what the state of current knowledge is.

Abbreviations should be explained.
Symbols and letters used in equations must be specified unless they are completely unambiguous.
Use SI units unless you have a specific reason for not doing so.

Description

This should contain a description of what you have done, any instrumentation and methods developed.
Sufficient details should be included so that another researcher in the field can repeat your experiments.
If you are using a procedure or instrumentation which has already been published, please include a reference to that paper and do not include the full description in the current paper.
Make sure you do not make this read like a doctoral thesis, some details are obvious to other researchers, others are not.

Results

The results serve to prove that your technique or method works. Do not include superfluous results, however you need to include sufficient information to show that the method works. If relevant include error bars and/or analysis, to demonstrate the accuracy of your technique.

Discussion

This is where you should elucidate and discuss the results obtained.
It is also an opportunity to compare your work with that of other authors, and to demonstrate why your work is an improvement on that already published.
This is also the opportunity to write about the relevance of the work and how it could be developed in the future.

Reference list

This should not consist of mainly your own references! Authors who cite only themselves do not make themselves appear to be the leaders in the field, on the contrary they appear to have made little effort to perform proper literature searches and to acknowledge the work of others.
The usual convention is that the author should put his or her work in a general context by citing a few papers that are (1) closely related or (2) deal with similar or parallel or analogous or related developments or (3) set the historical context. This convention is important because it helps the reader to judge the importance and context of the new work.
You should also refer to papers containing known procedures, methods and instrumentation descriptions, to avoid repetition in your paper.
It can be a good idea to refer to previous articles published in the submiting journal as this also shows that your work is relevant to the journal’s audience.
Relevant references will also serve to put your work in the context of your field of research. It is very rare that a researcher is working in a field in which no papers have been published for the past 10 years, yet some manuscripts fail to contain more recent references, which only reinforces the impression that no thorough literature search has been carried out. If there are no recent references - why is this? Is your work really of interest to the scientific community?
In Measurement Science and Technology we would like to be able to publish the reference list with full title, journal and authors where applicable, as this is most helpful to the reader, and enables us to create links to the articles via the reference list on the online journal. For example:

1. 1993 Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement (Geneva: International Organization for Standardization)

2. Glaser M 2000 Cycles of comparison measurements, uncertainties and efficiencies Meas. Sci. Technol.11 20-4

3. Weise K and Woger W 1999 Uncertainty and Measurements in Data Evaluation (Berlin: Wiley-VCH) (in German)

4. Schmidt J, Volkel R, Stork W, Schwider J, Streibl N and Durst F 1992 Diffractive beam splitter for laser Doppler velocimetry Opt. Lett.17 1240-2

The references should give enough detail so that the reader will be able to locate a copy without too much difficulty. You should try to avoid references to conference proceedings, unless easily accessible.
We ask that you include a copy of any references which may be difficult for the referee to obtain when you send your manuscript in.

Figures

Figures should be clear and legible.
Figures should illustrate the text. Do not include superfluous figures.
Each axis should have a scale and an axis label to indicate which quantity is represented and in which units.
Symbols and lines should be clear enough so that they will still be legible after the figure has been reduced.
Colour is expensive, therefore it is in your interests to consider whether colour is necessary in your figures.

Conclusion

As most researchers know, the abstract and conclusion are often the first (and sometimes the only!) parts of a paper which are read. It is therefore important that your conclusion sums up the main results of the paper in a clear and concise way. The conclusion should summarise the significant advances made.
Conclusions should not be mere repetition of results previously stated. They should summarise the main points, and their implications for future research in the field should also be pointed out.

General

We request that when sending in your manuscript you also include the details of two potential referees, as this can help to expedite the review process.
All pages should be numbered.
Check the numbering of equations, figures, tables and references with the text. Are all those referred to in the text present in the manuscript? Equally are all the figures, tables and references you have included referred to in the text?

Before sending in your manuscript – please CONSIDER THE REFEREES.

Most authors will act as referees for other papers during their careers, so it is in everyone’s interests to take as much care as possible when submitting your manuscript.

Most, if not all, of the following points may seem obvious, but it is still surprising the number of authors who send in manuscripts which are difficult to understand or incomplete and therefore make the job of referees much harder and cause delays in the publication of your paper.

Please consider the referees.
Submitting your paper with 1½ or double line spacing also makes it easier for the referee to read and annotate.

1. Check that all your pages are numbered. It can be helpful if, as well as numbering your pages, you number the lines or paragraphs as well. This can make it easier for the referee to refer to specific sections of your manuscript.

2. Check that you have included an abstract, which contains the essential information of the article. It should be complete by itself and suitable for direct inclusion in an abstracting service.

3. Check that your list of references is complete.

4. Check that all your figures are numbered and referred to correctly in the text. It is worth remembering that figure reduction may make thin lines and some symbols unreadable.

5. Check that your figure captions are present and make sense.

6. Ask an English speaking colleague to read through the manuscript for you or at least put your manuscript through an English language spell checker. (This does not apply solely to non-native English speakers!)

7. Check that all acronyms and abbreviations are clearly explained when they first appear in the text. They may be obvious to you, but not to many readers.

8. Make sure all your figures are clear and readable, and that any acronyms and abbreviations are not obscure.

9. Immediately before submitting your paper, make sure you do a literature search to check that you haven’t missed any relevant references or that near identical work has not been previously published!

10. Make sure we have your current correspondence address, as well as any address changes for the coming year.

ref: http://apps.lib.whu.edu.cn/ensci/show_tg.asp?id=16314