The importance of conformity combined with the
variation of structure in practice leads to our most central
piece of advice: If an author is new to publishing a
particular type of research, it is best to find one or two
recently published articles that report similar research
either in the target journal or a high-quality journal of
the same type and use them as templates to organize the
content. Whether publishing a paper that is quantitatively
testing a mediated model based on survey data,
one that is building theory through a qualitative analysis
of multiple case studies, or one that is developing a conceptual
model based on the integration of different bodies of research, recently published papers doing the same thing provide invaluable examples to suggest what types of content should go where; what methods-related
information should be disclosed and how it should be
disclosed; what types of evidence, logic, and arguments
are persuasive; and how figures and tables can be used
effectively. Deconstructing different sections to understand
what content must go where can be very helpful.
For example, what does each sentence in an abstract
communicate? How many paragraphs form the introduction
and how is the research question justified and
the paper’s contribution expressed? How are the theory
and results presented and discussed?