The week on Nature Network: Friday 23 May
This weekly Nautilus column highlights some of the online discussion at Nature Network in the preceding week that is of relevance to scientists as authors.
The Nature Network week column is archived here.
Today, the National Portrait Gallery in London unveils a portrait of Nobel laureate Sir Paul Nurse, who shared the prize for Medicine in 2001 for his work on cell division. Matt Brown asks Network readers to nominate their suggestions for whose portrait they would like to see in the gallery.
Good news for crystallographers: Hariharan Jayaram reports how a new generation of wikis, mostly based on the mediawiki platform, are being "constantly updated with crystallographic tips and tricks and plain old documentation by everyone from the creators of these powerful packages to seasoned users and even beginners."
In the Good Paper journal club, William Burns writes: "Perhaps we’re trying to be too scientific about defining what is good and bad writing? I think as scientists we hear about “a rule of writing”, and our eyes light up as if we have been given the keys to getting in Nature every week. We like to have some certainty, some “laws of physics” in the writing game. But I do feel a lot of the “rules” are snake oil." Bob O'Hara had addressed a similar theme in his blog post 'The hierarchical structure of bad writing', to which several people have made their suggestions about constructing (rather than the process of writing) a scientific paper, including Brian Derby, who writes "is no correct way to write a paper because the context is important." But, as Martin Fenner warns, "irony is a dangerous rhetorical device, because it can confuse the readers." (Examples provided.)
Allan Sudlow alerts readers to a debate called Citation in Science, to be held next week, 27 May, at the British Library in London (all welcome, but register in advance via this link), and proposes continuing the debate at Nature Network. He suggests a few topics to get started, including: ‘Tools for the Job’: does use of a single-citation search tool (PubMed, UKPMC, Google Scholar, Web of Science) bias the results? Is there a call for the use of mutiple tools?; and ‘Don’t Quote Me on That’: Even when the “original” paper is cited it is often misquoted. Do those citing not always fully understand the meaning behind a paper? Is this form of mis-citation more a case of misinterpretation rather than misrepresentation? For more on these and other similar, pertinent topics, visit the Citation in Science forum.
Senkei Umehara asks Nature Nanotechnology editor Ai Lin Chun: "Based on your experience, do you agree that there is a certain degree of “seasonality” in the number of submitted manuscripts? Could the acceptance rate differ between high and low seasons, if any?" See the editor's reply here.