Achieving a More Disciplined R and D Literature

One way to help control the growth of engineering and scientific literature and the associated problems of information retrieval is to start at the source-to seek simple but powerful ways of increasing the efficiency of papers during the writing. Some specific methods of structuring journal manuscripts are shown in which the original, important portions of the text and selected illustrations are deliberately expanded, while others are de-emphasized by having less space devoted to them. The new methods involve using a three-sentence abstract of special structural style and high information content; illustrating the most significant technical contribution by means of a prominent figure; and scaling the size of text sections according to relative importance.