 Hello, my name is Roger Watson and I'm the Editor-in-Chief of Nurse Education and Practice. That's an academic journal published by Elsevier. In this session, I want to talk to you about some important guidelines for reporting research. In other words, I want to talk to you about some important guidelines for writing academic manuscripts in which you report your research. If you do this properly, then they will make a good impression on the editor and are likely to be sent out for review. And of course, if they're sent out for review, they're much more likely to be accepted, which is ultimately the aim of what you're trying to do. So what I want to talk about really is the structure of an academic article. And I always advise anyone writing at any stage in their career to do three things. One, write for a specific journal. Target at that journal. Don't just write manuscripts and then hope that they'll be taken. So target a journal. Second, read the guidelines for that journal. And that will tell you a great deal about what's needed in terms of the structure of an article and even some ideas about how it should be written. And finally, take a look at articles in that journal. Recent ones and particularly ones that are of the kind that you're trying to submit. These things will all help you to structure and to write your article properly. Now I've mentioned the structure and I have a very eminent academic colleague with whom I've been lucky enough to write several academic papers. Every time we sit down to write, the first thing he says every time is, what's the story? And I think there's a very important lesson in that, in the sense that when you're writing an academic paper and reporting your research, you're telling a story. You're telling a short story. And as everyone knows, a short story has a beginning and a middle and an end. And indeed an academic article should have a beginning, a middle and an end. So that beginning, middle and end help it to move in one direction. The paper should be logically structured and that's not difficult because of the headings and subheadings you're normally given by the journal and provided you get the right material under those headings and subheadings, the logic of the paper follows rather nicely. So you don't have to think about this too much, but you should be aware of what you're trying to do. So the structure of an academic paper always should start broadly. It should focus down and narrow in the middle and then at the end it should broaden out again. And some people actually represent this graphically with an hourglass, but at the top narrow in the middle and broad at the bottom. So I'm going to look at those three areas of an academic paper, explain what they are and also help you within those areas to structure them appropriately. And then we'll talk about some of the finer points perhaps of writing these types of papers. So the first broad part of an academic paper is the introduction and the background. And sometimes these are separate sections. However, whatever the structure is specified by the journal, you should always start off with an introduction, which is a very broad brush approach to the area of research that you're addressing, what the issues are, why you're interested in it and that kind of thing, but it should be broad and not too narrow. Then another broad section is the background and the background should be a reflection on the literature that's already been written in this area. In other words, telling the reader what's already known and what gap you hoped to fill and the background should finish with a research question or hypothesis because that's what guides what you actually do.