How to put a square peg in a round hole: An iterative approach to the IMRAD format

Let’s talk about the increasing formality of the journal paper structure. I recently read that an estimated 64 million academic papers have been published in the last three decades—WHAT?!? Not surprising since there are now more than 30,000 journals currently publishing papers, and new journals coming online every day! WHAT?!?

But I'm in a niche field so only a few journals are relevant to me, you might respond in an effort to quell a feeling of overwhelm…My response: while yes, research is increasingly specialized—creating a demand for journals like the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (MDPI) and the Dynamics of Assymetric Conflict (Taylor & Francis), readers are increasingly inter-disciplinary and include those outside the academic tower in the practitioner space. This means that our readers are increasingly less familiar with our specialized fields AND that journals outside our field are increasingly relevant to our own knowledge base.

All of this is to set up the argument that we should embrace the IMRAD format and relinquish the desire to be creative in matters of journal paper organization. The IMRAD gives readers a clear roadmap of where to find specific types of information in a paper so that they don’t have to read the whole thing. I hear you, you want people read your whole paper because all of it is important information. And I gently respond, the only important information in your paper is what is relevant to the reader. So why not make it easy for your reader to find that information? We no longer have the luxury of reading everything in our fields extensively; we now must limit ourselves to abstracts, skimming, and review papers (which we also skim). Like a chef relying on mise-en-place, knowing what goes where improves readability, likelihood of getting publish, citations, and your contribution to science. It is time we embrace our mise-en-IMRAD.

 For those of you less than familiar with the IMRAD format, here is a brief outline—check out my freebie video in the library (sign up for a free membership to access it!) for more details or, of course, feel free to do your own research 😊 IMRAD prescribes the main sections of a peer review journal paper as such:

The IMRAD format is rigid in the sense that it dictates what kind of information to put in each section of (and how to order) your journal paper. All of which brings me to the topic I most want to write about today: writing as an iterative process. While the IMRAD dictates structure, it can also free us from linear writing. When we sit down and attempt to write a paper from beginning to end, we often lose the thread—the core argument or thesis or BIG IDEA that we have committed ourselves to contribute to the scientific discourse. A journal paper should be conceptually organized around the BIG IDEA, which then gets described in four different ways answering (according to each IMRAD section):

1. INTRODUCTION : What is the big social problem that has not been addressed that is critically important that your BIG IDEA address? Or, what is your topic?
2. METHODS: What is the scientifically rigorous research design behind your BIG IDEA? Or, how did you do it?
3. RESULTS: What is the evidence that clearly and coherently points toward your BIG IDEA? Or, what did you find?
4. DISCUSSION: Finally, how does your BIG IDEA actually address (fully or partially) the critically important social problem described in #1? Or, why does it matter?

 In teaching design for many years, I am intimately familiar with iterative thinking. A concept that can serve us well in writing. Yet, it’s hard to practice iterative writing when staring at a blank page laid out like this:

1.  Introduction
   • Literature Review
   • Context
2.  Methods
   • Research design
   • Analysis
3.  Results
4.  Discussion
5. Conclusion

So why not think of it like this:

Then go a step farther and extend two sections to mirror each other:

Then, you might change your approach to something like this where you support or justify what is written in one section with background in another section:

I encourage you to play around with these kinds of tools to create your own iterative process to writing your journal paper within the IMRAD format.

Iteration gives us permission to go back and forth to different sections and subsections of our draft to fill in the threads of evidence that will cohere to support our BIG IDEA. It also gives us permission to fill in the parts that are easiest and leave the difficult parts until later—when we might find (and I have found this to be true) that they are in fact easier to write because we clarified our thinking while working on the easier parts.

As scientists, we follow rigid rules. At the same time, we are uniquely creative beings by nature—we imagine solutions that do not yet exist to big problems that already do. We don’t need to stop being creative just to fit in the round peg into the square hole of journal paper writing—a hole defined specifically, precisely, scientifically to be translatable to all the other people holding round pegs. In fact, I have found the square hole to actually give me permission to embrace the roundness—to be more creative, to be more flexible, to be iterative in my approach to filling in the holes.