Nautilus

The week on Nature Network: Friday 17 October

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.

“Writer’s block can be an impediment to putting thoughts on paper but there are other obstacles as well – obstacles that can be overcome once they’re made explicit”, writes Linda Cooper in the Good Paper Journal Club forum. “…many of the students I teach are ‘flummoxed’ because they have difficulty pinpointing their most important finding – they usually want to include – everything – in their articles – especially the technique they’ve struggled to develop. To help remedy this problem, students explain their research to a sympathetic group of their peers. Because this group is multidisciplinary, they can comfortably ask clarifying questions (questions that a specialist reader may not feel comfortable asking – you’re the expert after all!). This process helps researchers think critically about their work – a crucial step on the way to writing clearly about their important finding.”

In a more light-hearted vein, Bob O’Hara points to a discussion from someone worried about whether papers are more cited if the author list contains “bigwigs”. One study suggests it can do, if there aren’t too many authors. If it were true, does this reflect the actual contribution of the “name”, or a tendency for other researchers to be drawn to the paper by the name they recognize?

Henry Gee continues a theme of how scientists communicate their work to the broader public. “Here is an example of what I mean by this authoritarian approach. Ten years ago, John Durant, then Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Imperial College, used the release of the first X Files movie as an opportunity to attack pseudoscience (’Pseudo-science, complete fiction’, The Independent, p. 13, 21 August 1998). What Durant missed is that for all its content about aliens, paranormal phenomena and conspiracy theories, the X-Files is scientific in the sense that the two protagonists, FBI agents Mulder and Scully, approach their mysterious cases, each with their own hypotheses, which they argue about, and then seek to test, only to find, vwery often, that a definitive result remains just out of reach. The lab scientists among you will know just what I mean. Real science is often messy, argumentative – and inconclusive.”

Craig Rowell has established a new Nature Network forum, ‘Going to meetings’, for people to list the meetings they plan to attend and what they are presenting. This will be an opportunity to educate everyone about different meetings, he notes, and to connect with other Nature Networkers at the conference.

Why aren’t scientists’ biographies in the bestseller list?, asks Nature’s Books and Arts editor, Joanne Baker. She wonders whether our picture of science takes enough notice of the characters and life stories of individual scientists, noting an essay in the 16 Oct issue of Nature (p871), in which biographer Georgina Ferry* asks why the life stories of so few scientists make it into the bookshops or are in the “top 100” biographies on Amazon. What do you think? Join the discussion at the Nature Network Opinion forum, and add your favourite scientific biographies – so far including William Bateson and Alfred Wegener. (*Georgina Ferry is the author of very well-received biographies of Dorothy Hodgkin and Max Perutz.)

Previous Nature Network columns.

Comments

Comments are closed.