This section should outline the research topic your study belongs to. You start by shortly describing the overall topic, such as a disease. This should not take more than 2-3 sentences. Afterwards you proceed by introducing the topic in more depth and detail. You only need to talk about topics that are relevant to your study. As you by now already wrote the discussion, introduce major topics that are highlighted in the discussion, but be careful not just to repeat the same information. The information provided in the introduction should enable the reader to understand why your study was executed and what ought to be achieved by the experiments presented in the results.
Framing Your Research
You can introduce your test system, details about important drugs, relevant signaling pathways or even methods, if you used an unusual method. All these descriptions should eventually lead to the objective of your performed experiments: Why did you perform the experiments shown in the results section? You therefore describe the objective or rationale of your research at the end of the introduction. Here you already describe shortly, which analyses were performed and why?
The introduction is written in present tense, as you describe published data. When you, at the end, outline your analyses, you need to switch to past tense, as you are then talking about analyses that are not published yet.
Also, here in the introduction, be precise and provide all information relevant for understanding why you cite a certain publication. You always need to provide sufficient details of the study, such as utilized test system (in vitro, animal model, human tissue) as it is a big difference if data originate from an in vitro system or from human tissue of an Alzheimer’s disease patient.
Similar to the discussion, you should also cite primary literature here in the introduction. At the beginning, when talking about a very broad topic, it is o.k. to cite review articles, but also here, mention it! (…reviewed by (Doe et al., 2020). As an example, when introducing Alzheimer’s disease, you can cite a very general review article providing details about disease symptoms, causes, pathological features and so on. Choose a review article that contains relevant information to introduce your research topic. When introducing things in more detail, like your test system or a signaling pathway, you should cite primary literature only.
Today’s conclusion about the introduction section:
I:
Provide all information needed to understand the results and discussion
