Tldr
- Reviewers need to be able to trust your work
- Set clear expectations to manage expectations (and increase trust)
- Use appropriate structure to improve clarity (makes it easier to understand and trust)
Building trust
Science is interpretation, and interpretation requires trust. You can’t just say “I measured it right.” Readers need to verify your logic: Did you ask a clear question? Did you use appropriate data? Do you actually answer the question you asked?
That means you need to answer those questions in your text.
Setting realistic expectations
What’s more, reviewers need to understand what your paper is (and is not) about. This type of expectation management happens explicitly in the Aims & Scope section of the paper’s Introduction, but implicitly also happens by describing the knowledge gap, as well as the way the Abstract is written (study contributions), and how the paper is titled.
Each of these elements should be crafted carefully and accurately reflect what the paper actually delivers. If these elements overpromise, the reviewer will be disappointed, and potentially request that additional work is carried out to meet their expectations.
Building trust through structure
Reviewers — like all humans — have finite working memory. That means you need to make it easy to follow your reasoning. If your logic isn’t visible — if they can’t easily see the path from question to data to answer — they’ll conclude you don’t know it either.
That’s why it helps to follow a structure they expect. Sure, IMRaD is obvious: you introduce your work in the Introduction, discuss it in the Discussion. But your readers expect more than that — the hidden backbone underneath.
In IMRaD papers, readers have specific expectations of which information they will find where — and what each role a paragraph should fulfil (see also IMRaD sections). Beyond that, it also helps to ensure there is a logical flow of information between consecutive sentences (see for example the old-to-new principle in Readability).