Many scientific papers are hard to understand due to their poor writing. Verbose style, unmethodical presentation of ideas, excess or lack of details in an article can make a good idea be lost for the scientific community. This review is a practical guide for writing a research paper. It presents briefly the scientific format and the structure of a paper, guidelines for making efficient tables and figures and a few elements on style. Folowing simple guidelines can greatly improve the quality of scientific papers sent for publication.