What are Original research articles (ORAs)?
Original research articles (ORAs) report study findings – interventional or observational research, cost effectiveness analyses, etc. Reviews don’t report new data – they simply review data from previously presented/published studies.
If you’re trying to learn about something new (e.g. in my job as a medical writer I might want to quickly understand the main drugs used to treat a particular disease), read a couple of key reviews first.
But if you want to, for example, compare your study to a previous study in, say, a different population, then look at ORAs.
In this blog post, I’m going to concentrate on ORAs and how they are structured.
How many words are typical journals?
A published ORA will be about 3000 words, probably with three or four figures, one or two tables, and about 20 references.
What's the layout?
On the first page of an ORA you’ll find the Abstract – a top-line summary (usually about 250 words) of the study objectives, methods, results and conclusions. Read this first!
Abstract:
On the first page of an ORA you’ll find the Abstract – a top-line summary (usually about 250 words) of the study objectives, methods, results and conclusions.
Read this first! A quick scan of the Abstract should give you enough detail to establish whether the paper is relevant to you and whether you need to read on.
The Body:
The body of the paper will follow the IMRAD structure: Introduction; Methods; Results; (and) Discussion. I’ll go through the contents of each of these sections in turn.
Introduction:
The purpose of the Introduction is to set the scene – to help the reader to understand what the problem is and guide them towards why there is a need for the study. The Introduction may include a definition of the condition in question, particularly if the definition is contested. It will probably include epidemiology data to highlight the size of the problem.
Top tip!
The last sentence of the Introduction is usually the study objective – so, when quickly analysing if a paper is relevant, you can skip to this final sentence without needing to read the whole Introduction.
Methods:
The Methods section describes how the study was conducted. It will usually include sections on study design, treatments, patient population, endpoints, ethics and statistical analysis. You probably only need to skim the Methods section, and you can almost certainly overlook the statistical analysis section completely when doing your first skim read.
Stats do, however, become important when you’re reporting and comparing results (e.g. if you’re writing a dissertation), as you’ll need to be sure you’re comparing apples with apples.
Results:
The Results section is the one you will want to read in detail. In this section, study findings are presented without any interpretation (this is left for the Discussion). The section will usually include:
Discussion:
The Discussion section gives an interpretation of the study findings, so it is worth reading in detail:
References:
The Discussion will be followed by the References – most references will be other published papers although occasionally ‘personal communications’ and conference presentations may be cited (although some journals won’t allow these and insist on published references only).
Top Tip! You don’t have to read the reference list – save yourself time and skip over this section!
Supplimentary Material
Some ORAs will also have supplementary material, often as online-only content. Authors often use this as a way to include extra data that aren’t important enough for inclusion in the main manuscript but that add useful information for the reader (e.g. list of participating institutions, study protocol, exploratory outcome figures/tables).
Chances are you won’t need to read the supplementary material, but it might be worth skimming it to check you’re not missing anything relevant to your research.
Feel free to ignore sections like ‘Acknowledgements’ – transparency is a big thing in journal publishing and so authors are required to provide details of anything that could be considered a conflict of interest. But you don’t need to know this information so skip it!
And that’s it!
Now you know how ORAs are structured, you have the information you need to read and even write journal articles. I hope you find this guide useful and I wish you the best with your studies.
Look out for my next blog post on the journal submission process, coming soon!
Claire Foskett is a Principal Medical Writer at a London medical communications agency. As well as writing for work, Claire also enjoys creative writing in her spare time and has published her first book, ‘Dear Boobs: A book of poems about the love, leaks and let-downs of breastfeeding’, available from her online store: https://claire-foskett.sumup.link/ (£6.99).