In my role as a writing advisor to young scientists, I'm a big supporter of using schemas (or templates) to help organise a research paper. A schema provides a layout into which the writer introduces the details relevant to their own report. The one scientists are most familiar with is the "IMRAD" system of partitioning the paper (Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion), and its widespread use alone indicates it has been a useful aid to scientific communication. But teachers of academic writing like myself also suggest the use of schemas for the individual sections of a paper and even for paragraphs.