2010 – VOLUME 39 – Issue 1

Scientific literature has considerably evolved since Louis Pasteur's first publications in 1859 and particularly during the last 20 years. The progress of research, emergence of Internet, the need for evidence and the increased number of publications have led the scientific community to adapt in order to manage these new variables. This evolution moves towards a homogenization of scientific dissemination standards allowing a better understanding of the results obtained by research and a possibility to compare data published by different teams working on the same subject. Facing these evolutions, this article attempts to review the constraints of scientific writing in three parts. The first part reviews scientific writing with its rules of style, precision and conciseness. The second part details and analyzes different types of currently published articles and proposes a classification into two categories: those searching for evidence and those not. The structure of each type of scientific article is presented and the corresponding writing guideline, presently recognized by the international scientific community, are argued and proposed in appendix. The last part of this article presents the objectives to achieve when writing different parts of a scientific article, from title to bibliography.