Comparing Scientific Papers

Scientific papers are extremely important in the field of science because of the way that they allow scientists to communicate their findings with each other. Primary literature is the most important source of information for scientists because it includes the most current reports on the topic of interest. Primary literature includes first-hand reports of discoveries and is written by scientists, with a target reading audience of both other scientists and science students. For this assignment, I chose two pieces of primary literature to compare in terms of content and format.
When comparing the content of these two scientific papers to each other, it is clear that they differ greatly in many ways. The first paper that I read was "Behavioral …show more content…
For instance, the lobster paper is much lengthier than the whale shark paper. The whale shark paper also looks more like an article than the lobster paper does. The lobster paper is clearly broken up into different sections, including the abstract, introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion, and conclusions. However, the whale shark paper is not broken up into these sections. The fact that the whale shark paper is in condensed format makes it harder to find where the hypothesis and statement of purpose are located.
The easiest component to identify in the whale shark paper was the abstract. Even though it was not labeled like it was in the lobster paper, the first paragraph of the paper is in bold, and also gives a summary of the researcher's findings. This is why I believe that the first paragraph of this paper would be considered the abstract. Again, the abstract of the whale shark paper is much shorter than the lobster paper's abstract. However, they both do an excellent job in providing a brief summary of the paper and helps us as the reader to decide if we want to continue