Nautilus

At the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen this December, talk will turn to scientific, political and economic issues with a global reach and a long history — not easy to pick up from the daily news. Nature Reports Climate Change asked select experts on climate change what books we should be reading ahead of the big event. See Nature Reports Climate Change for the selections made my Mike Hulme, Tony Juniper, Mark Lynas, Oliver Morton, Ron Oxburgh, Rajendra K. Pachauri, Roger Pielke, Jr, Andrew Revkin and Joseph Romm, which range from popular scientific accounts to technical reports; and from explaining the controversies to passionate accounts of solutions. Some quotations from the recommendations:
--"a must-read book for those who want a primer on all the key solutions countries will be considering at Copenhagen."
--"Policymakers will have to forge a highly ambitious deal to avoid the crisis."
--" 'Climate change fatigue' is said to be an ailment slowly spreading through the media. As Copenhagen takes over the headlines, Bryan Lovell's lively new book — peering into the doubts, concerns and prejudices that have dogged climate negotiators — is an instant tonic for this malady."
--"The painful truth is that no one knows how to decarbonize the global economy.....— it's a lesson of history."
--"As governments head grimly into negotiations determined to avoid a policy failure, it's worth keeping in mind that the system they're hashing out is not the only possible one or even the best."
--"a grand agreement is less achievable than a set of specific deals on particular issues."
--"Beyond the frequently invoked battle-line between climate change 'believers' and 'sceptics', there is a deeper, and in the end more important, division of thinking."
--"This book is not going to help anyone get to grips with the intricacies of the UN climate negotiations, but if you want to lift your head from the trenches for an overview of the twenty-first century, it's a great place to start. "
--"it clearly maps out the serious consequences of inaction, as well as the feasibility and affordability of action both to adapt to the impacts of climate change and to mitigate emissions of greenhouse gases."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on October 09, 2009
Categories: Communication, Public and media, Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Editorial in the July issue of Nature Methods is the journal's popular annual round up of summer reading (Nat. Meth. 6, 471; 2009). According to the Editorial, for those who look hard enough there are a few good fiction books to be found with refreshingly realistic biologists as central characters in laboratory settings. A mix of the old and the new follows, including brief accounts of Cantor's Dilemma by Carl Djerassi; Intuition by Allegra Goodman; Long for this World by Michael Byers; Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis; Experimental Heart by Jennifer Rohn; and Mendel's Dwarf by Simon Mawer.
At the journal's Methagora blog, Allison Doerr emphasizes one benefit of science-in-fiction: as a "medium for overturning stereotypes about scientists, and for getting more people interested in science and for educating them about what scientists do." Comments and suggestions of good science-in-fiction from readers are welcome at Methagora.

Nature Methods' previous science-in-fiction recommendations.
See also: From Bench to Book by Jennifer Rohn (Nature 451, 128; 2008).

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 13, 2009
Categories: Education, Public and media, Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

Frank Gannon says goodbye as senior editor at EMBO reports in the journal's April issue (10, 293; 2009). I shall certainly miss his monthly editorials, which I always looked forward to reading and often mentioned on this blog. On the occasion of his goodbye, he looks back at his contribution:

"EMBO reports has not only garnered a reputation for reporting good science, but also paved the way with a novel Science & Society section. It has been a joy to help mould this section into something that our readers appreciate. A related major task—and a great pleasure—has been writing monthly editorials. When I had finished the first editorial, I experienced a moment of panic as I was faced with the challenge of finding a topic for the next month and beyond. More than one hundred editorials later, that concern has long gone. There are so many topics to write about that are relevant to scientists and that are not often addressed in other journals. Some of my favourites include language barriers for non-English speaking scientists (March, 2008), The downsides of mobility (March, 2007), the fate of scientists who reach retirement age (March, 2004), bullying (October, 2008), Family matters (November, 2005), and role models and mentors (December, 2006). Then there are all of the societal topics that address how science is catering to, and is directed by, politics and business, such as the 'Faustian' bargain of private interests and university research (March, 2003), or the role of government in directing science (December, 2003). My editorial, An NIH/NSF for Europe ( June, 2002), was one of the first serious calls for a European Research Council, which has now become a reality. And, of course, it is always fun to take a sidelong look at the scientific community and comment on how we behave. My favourites on this theme are Conformists (October, 2007) and Meeting standards ( January, 2006). It was similarly amusing to write a tongue-in-cheek rejection letter to Charles Darwin ( January, 2009) while a crowded world of communication was eulogizing him for his two-hundreth birthday."
And there is news of the new order:
"Howy Jacobs has agreed to become the new Senior Editor of EMBO reports. I have known Howy for many years, both as a great scientist and communicator, and I have had many thought-provoking and enjoyable discussions with him. I have no doubt that the journal is in good hands for the years to come. I am certain that with Howy's guidance, EMBO reports will increase even further in value and stature as an important source of information for the scientific community—and our broader readership—communicating both insightful scientific research, and commenting on and reporting the ongoing debates about how science and society shape one other in the twenty-first century."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on April 20, 2009
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Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and Thomson Reuters are holding a joint seminar on publishing excellence and how to correctly interpret journal citation data on 23 January 2009 in Sydney, Australia. This seminar will go into detail about the use and misuse of impact factors along with a presentation by senior editor Leslie Sage on how to get published in Nature.
Four speakers will present on the following:
Antoine Bocquet, Associate Director, NPG Asia-Pacific:
Growth of Nature Publishing Group
Dr Leslie Sage, senior editor, physical sciences, Nature :
How to publish a paper in Nature
Dr Berenika M Webster, strategic business manager, Thomson Reuters Scientific, Asia Pacific:
About use and misuse of impact factor and other citation metrics
Dr Dugald McGlashan, associate publisher, Asian journals, NPG:
Developments in author and reader services in a changing publishing landscape
This seminar is free to attend and open to those interested in publishing in Nature titles and journal citation data.
See here for more information, details of the venue, and to reserve your place.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 08, 2009
Categories: Author benefits, Citation analysis, Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

A clever use of fable brings surprising clarity to the story of climate change, thinks Euan Nisbet of Royal Holloway College, London, in his review for Nature Reports Climate Change (doi:10.1038/climate.2008.123) of Tyler Volk's book CO2 Rising: The World's Greatest Environmental Challenge. The author uses parables and puns to describe scientific concepts, creating a protagonist who is “a little carbon atom called Dave.” From the review:
"Like Prometheus, Dave habitually spends millions of years bound in a limestone cliff. But occasionally he escapes, most recently to travel variously into a glass of beer, through the rear end of an Irish earthworm, inside the brain of a giant Galapagos tortoise and as part of an air parcel to Mauna Loa where he is measured by climatologist Charles David Keeling, to be recorded on the infamous ‘Keeling curve’, which documents the twenty-first century rise in atmospheric CO2.
Dave has relatives: Coaleen, Oilivier and Methaniel in the fossil fuel family, and Icille. Coaleen heads for a strangler fig tree in Australia, Methaniel is taken up by a plant in the Arctic tundra, and Oilivier, who becomes a bicarbonate ion in the ocean, is followed by cheerful Dave, who finds himself diving to a sea bed carbon burial site. Really cool Icille gets trapped in an ice bubble."
Members of the Nature Network science writers' forum discuss whether this approach to communicating scientific research is "nauseous anthropomorphic twaddle" in the words of one contributor, or a way to "make concepts more accessible and fun" in the opinion of another. The reviewer believes it works in this case:
"Fables, like political cartoons, are powerful. Orwell’s Animal Farm was the stake through the heart of Stalin’s Marxism. Tyler Volk’s simple tales in CO2 Rising are not at that level, but they are clearer and more easily read than the prose of most scientific writing, even in good scientific journalism. That clarity brings understanding. Despite — or perhaps because of — its dreadful puns and apparent simplicity, this is a book that can persuade, can educate, and can change policy."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 23, 2008
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Biology Week, an online "open house" for biologists, biology students and other interested people, begins today (22 September) on Citizendium, a 'next-generation' wiki encyclopedia started by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger. (See this Peer to Peer post for a brief comparison of online encyclopaedias.)
From the Citizendium announcement: "during this week, biologists and anyone interested in the topic are invited to test the Citizendium system. Editors and authors from the project's Biology Workgroup will be on hand to meet and greet new people on the wiki. "I strongly believe that the Citizendium system will be appealing to many scientists and scholars," said Sanger. "Many of them just need to give it a try. Biology Week is an excuse for biologists to try out the system together." Gareth Leng, a professor of Experimental Physiology at the University of Edinburgh, and Citizendium author and editor, described the project: 'Our role will not be to tell readers what opinions they should hold, but to give them the means to decide, rationally, for themselves. The role of experts is critical—not to impose opinions, but to support accuracy in reporting and citing information'. "
The Citizendium, or "citizens' compendium", uses the same software as Wikipedia and is a public-expert hybrid project to produce a general reference resource. The community encourages general public participation, but makes a low-key, guiding role for experts. It also requires real names and asks contributors to sign a "social contract." As a result, the project is said to be vandalism-free and, despite its youth (its public launch was just 18 months ago), has steadily added more than 8,000 articles.
Further information:
Citizendium website and press release about this project.
Biology Week homepage.
Sample article: Life, said to demonstrate the success of the collaborative-editing system.
(Thank you to Shirley Wu for alerting me to this project.)

Posted by Maxine Clarke on September 22, 2008
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Linda Cooper of McGill University, Montreal, writes in Correspondence (Nature 455, 26; 2008):

The World-Wide Web is remarkable as a vehicle for communicating scientific discoveries. Online journals unite distant researchers and inspire worldwide collaborations. However, despite these advantages, there is a growing risk that papers published today are less successful in meeting their objectives than in the past.
To ensure clear communication, most journals encourage authors to write for a broad audience. But most published papers still compress too much information into uncomfortably short articles, leading to convoluted sentences, specialized terminology and a proliferation of abbreviations. Errors in grammatical style result in impenetrable and ambiguous texts that seriously undermine the scientific literature. This need not be the case.
Electronic publishing could offer authors limitless space to explain their ideas and discuss their new findings. Surprisingly, though, online manuscripts are often bound by the same space constraints as print manuscripts.
Authors are instructed to conform to print-journal guidelines, leading many to redirect essential material to online Supplementary Information. The recent explosion in Supplementary Information is problematic: it seems to have no standard format among different journals, and there is a common misperception that data in Supplementary Information have escaped peer review. It can be a nuisance for readers too. For example, if they want to peruse articles away from their computers and haven't downloaded the related Supplementary Information, it may be impossible for them to understand or fully evaluate the papers' merits.
The scientific article in 2008 is on the cusp of change, with one foot in the past and one in the future. Science journals should shed the constraints of the old media and exploit the advantages of the new, to offer readers easy and enjoyable access to the scientific literature.
Even if journals are successful at reinventing themselves, it won't be adequate unless the quality of writing in scientific manuscripts improves. Paradoxically, the deterioration in science writing seems to coincide with the swell in e-publications — at a time when the need to communicate advances in science is more urgent than ever. The quality of writing needs to match the power of today's e-publishing technology.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on September 10, 2008
Categories: Writing | Permalink | Comments (1)

Performing research in one language and having to write manuscripts in another—nearly always English—is not an easy task, according to Sonia M.R. Vasconcelos et al. in the latest issue of EMBO Reports (9, 700-702; 2008).Yet, they write, "Publishing in high-quality international journals is part of today's scientific zeitgeist and a challenge for researchers from developed and developing countries alike. However, competition to attract an editor's attention and to convince reviewers might be tougher for scientists from non-English speaking (NES) countries. As various authors have pointed out, the proficiency of the English language among a country's scientists could influence its scientific output (Man et al, 2004; Victora & Moreira, 2006; Meneghini & Packer, 2007; Vasconcelos et al, 2007). A recent econometric study, for example, stated that English proficiency is a significant factor for the performance of European science (Bauwens et al, 2007).
Some NES authors argue that they "don't compete on a level playing field when it comes to international science" and that "language and cultural barriers may be partly to blame" (Anon, 2002). However, it is not clear how much linguistic competence affects the visibility of research in NES countries. In particular, it is difficult to assess the link between a researcher's writing competence and established indicators of research output such as the number of publications and citations. Most countries do not maintain databases with comprehensive information about a researcher's academic profile and publication record, or they do not make this information publicly accessible."
Brazil, however, is an exception, and the EMBO Reports article presents some of the available statistics about communication skills from that country. One of the authors' conclusions is that governments and their research councils should invest more in training researchers to be fully competent in the English language.
Nature journals provide writing guidance at the author and reviewers' website in an article that provides links to various services and resources.
See here for a discussion at Nature Network about regional and minority languages in science communication.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on August 27, 2008
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Nature Structural & Molecular Biology (15, 767; 2008) announces a new section of the journal for articles that serve primarily as resources and also lead to novel molecular insights. Nature Structural & Molecular Biology focuses on the underpinnings of biological processes at the molecular level. However, in this era of large-scale, high-throughput experimentation, an increasing number of submissions to the journal describe mammoth data sets and the tools that facilitate their analysis. The new Resource section is for analyses of new data sets that lead to novel and arresting conclusions, as described in the journal's Guide to Authors. Resources are broad in scope and, in an era of burgeoning and ever-expanding technological advances, the approaches and findings that characterize this section will undoubtedly change over time. There are two examples of Resource articles in the journal's August issue:

Fission yeast SWI/SNF and RSC complexes show compositional and functional differences from budding yeast pp873 - 880
Brendon J Monahan, Judit Villén, Samuel Marguerat, Jurg Bahler, Steven P Gygi and Fred Winston
The Schizosaccharomyces pombe SWI/SNF family of ATP-dependent chromatin-remodeling complexes is now comprehensively analyzed, through composition, phenotypic and microarray analyses, thus broadly setting the stage for S. pombe as a new model organism for examining the SWI/SNF family remodelers. The S. pombe complexes are more akin to the metazoan SWI/SNF remodelers and have specific roles in repression of iron-transport genes.

A comprehensive library of histone mutants identifies nucleosomal residues required for H3K4 methylation pp881 - 888 Shima Nakanishi, Brian W Sanderson, Kym M Delventhal, William D Bradford, Karen Staehling-Hampton and Ali Shilatifard
A comprehensive library encompassing alanine scanning mutations across yeast histones is presented as a Resource that will facilitate screening of chromatin processes. The utility of the library is indicated by screening in cis and in trans for residues that affect histone H3K4 trimethylation, a modification that is associated with actively transcribed genes and known to be mediated by the Set1-COMPASS complex.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on August 21, 2008
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SciDevNet's Practical Guides offer very useful advice for scientists who wish to communicate their results, not only in journals but in other ways and using other media. Articles include 'How do I become a science journalist?'; 'Planning and writing a science story'; 'How do I apply for a research grant?'; 'Spotting fraudulent claims in science'; 'How do I become media-savvy?'; 'How do I make a science news story for the radio?'; and others. A full contents listing is here.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 16, 2008
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Jérôme Murienne, Alexander Ziegler & Bernhard Ruthensteiner write in a Correspondence to Nature (453, 450; 2008):
Since the release of Adobe Systems' Portable Document Format (PDF) version 1.6 in 2004, it has become possible to view interactively three-dimensional models that are embedded into PDF files. This attribute will dramatically increase information content as well as data transparency in scientific papers. Additionally, replacing multiple two-dimensional figures of a three-dimensional structure with one integrated interactive three-dimensional model will reduce the need for supplementary material.
The potential of this technological advance for all science is obvious. Because of the foreseeable rise in demand by the scientific community, publishers and scientific institutions need to work hand in hand to support the implementation of this highly desirable technique.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 03, 2008
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The paragraph reproduced below is the Abstract of the article 'Writing a clear and engaging paper for all astronomers' in Astronomy Communication, 290 221 (2003), by Leslie Sage, a senior editor at Nature who handles manuscript submissions in astronomy, planetary science and physics.

Scientists usually receive no formal training in how to communicate effectively scientific information. What little training we do get comes from our PhD supervisors, who may or may not be good communicators themselves. Moreover, too many scientists seem to feel that the goal of scientific writing is to impress others with the author's intelligence, and most of the rest forget that even people in closely related fields may not be aware of the jargon, background and technical details specific to each subfield. Yet the principles of clear writing are easily grasped, and with a little practice will become natural to implement. Even in a technical journal the audience is not restricted simply to a few direct competitors, so you need to explain why the general topic is interesting, what problems there are in the field, what you have done and how it has helped advance us towards the resolution of one or more of the problems.

The publisher, Springer Science and Business Media, has kindly given us permission to reproduce the author's version of this paper here, for the personal use only of those downloading it. We hope you enjoy reading it, and find it helpful in preparing your papers for submission to a Nature journal, whether in the field of astronomy or any other scientific discipline.
Download the article here; Word document

Posted by Maxine Clarke on April 17, 2008
Categories: Writing | Permalink | Comments (3)

If you are a scientist-blogger and are interested in a real meeting as opposed to a virtual carnival, please visit the Nature Network bloggers' forum , where Matt Brown reports the good news that The Royal Institution in London has offered to host a European science blogging conference later this year, to be organised by the bloggers. The rationale for the European bloggers' conference is given here.
The first thing to do, Matt writes, is to pick a date, from August 16th, 23rd, 30th, or September 13th, so please head to Nature Network and state your preference.
Another piece of science blogging news concerns microblogging. A microblog is a post of 140 or fewer words. Attila Csordas informs me that there is a new microblog called Biotecher, on the Twitter platform. Biotecher tracks every biotech-, biology-, medicine- and bioinformatics-related 'twitter' (microblog on the Twitter platform) to create a 'biotwitter community'.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on April 15, 2008
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In his Thesis article The literature of promises (Nat. Nanotech. 3, 180 - 181; 2008), Chris Toumey asks how science fiction has been influenced by nanotechnology, and why so many reports about the possibilities of nanotechnology read like science fiction. The article covers ideas discussed at and arising after a conference on nanotechnology, literature and society in December 2007. Professor Toumey writes: "Steve Lynn, my colleague in the English department at South Carolina, has been saying for years that the purpose of science fiction is not to predict the future, but rather to put science and technology in a new and different light so that we can explore their place in our lives. Nanotechnology endures a great deal of prognostication, prophecy and prediction in government documents, social-science journals and humanities conferences. It can be difficult to resist the urge to predict the future, but nanotechnology needs to be examined in terms of how it affects our lives today. Science fiction is hardly the only way to do so, but it has a rightful place among the humanistic perspectives on nanotechnology. Sometimes it treats nanotech lovingly and sometimes rudely, but nanotechnology and science fiction could have a long and beneficial friendship."
Read the rest of the Thesis article at Nature Nanotechnology, April 2008 issue.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on April 10, 2008
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The Nature Network journal club for well written papers, called the good paper journal club, has received seven nominations of papers in its first three weeks. The papers are each listed at the Nature Network group's forum, so you can comment on each one and how well or badly you feel it succeeds in conveying its message. In addition, the papers are collected as Connotea online bookmarks, using the tag "good paper journal club". We welcome your own nominations, both at Connotea and at the Nature Network journal club. Here's an example:
Functional genomic Analysis of C. elegans Molting
"I like both the Introduction and Discussion of this paper because they lead the reader logically through several facets of the study – in the Introduction, moving from general information to specific finding, and in the Discussion, moving from important finding to the new significance of the study. (While closer editing would sharpen the sentences, on the structural level I think that the paper works well.)"
The Nature Network good paper journal club forum is here, with all nominated papers listed and open for your comments.
Connotea tag for good paper journal club is here. Please add your own examples of well-written papers as online bookmarks, so others can access and read them.
Time for a Change blog is here, containing examples of good and poor writing style, and related discussion.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on April 08, 2008
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Striking a balance between the need to allocate credit fairly and the need to be readable can be a challenge for editors and journalists when writing about research papers, according to this month's (April) Editorial in Nature Nanotechnology (3, 179; 2008). Every week, editors at the Nature journals write 200-word articles about a research paper that explains the main results of the paper — why the work is interesting or important, how the results were obtained, what they mean for that area of research and beyond, and who did the work. Such articles appear every week as 'research highlights' at the website of each Nature journal. The Nature Nanotechnology Editorial discusses the challenges in writing these articles : what is interesting or important to one reader might be of little interest or import to another, for instance, and it may be impossible to say anything meaningful about the significance of the results, other than stating that they are indeed significant, in 200 or fewer words. Even awarding appropriate credit is hard in such limited space, as most papers have four or more authors, often from two or more institutions. The Editorial goes on to discuss some of the ways the journal deals with these problems, and contrasts research highlights with full scientific research papers.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on April 07, 2008
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This is a paper under discussion at the Nature Network forum for good, clearly written papers.
Inhibition of prostaglandin synthesis as a mechanism of action for aspirin-like drugs
by J R Vane
Nature New Biology 231, 232-235 (1971). Download PDF
Experiments with guinea-pig lung suggest that some of the therapeutic effects of sodium salicylate and aspirin-like drugs are due to inhibition of the synthesis of prostaglandins.

To discuss this paper, please visit the Nature Network good paper journal club.

We have created Connotea tags for the journal club, so you can view all the selections, and add your own, here.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on April 02, 2008
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From an Edtiorial in the current (April) issue of Nature Genetics (40, 375; 2008):
Communicating the details of science to nonspecialists is intrinsically hard because research entails specialized techniques for empirical testing of counterintuitive ideas. Public imagination may be more readily seized by stories that fit with preconceived models, and distortion can happen when communicators employ the most transmissible ideas. But when new concepts are successfully represented in everyday imagery, there is no reason the public cannot follow in detail the excitement of doing research. When engaged in the details of the analogy, nonspecialists can ask questions from a perspective that will be useful to the expert.
In an interview with Robyn Williams on Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Science Show [15 March 2008 edition], Oxford University researcher Kim Nasmyth explained molecular mechanisms of chromosome segregation with a riddle. In his allegory, chromosomes are represented as pairs of socks.

Continue reading "Analogies to describe science to nonscientists" »

Posted by Maxine Clarke on March 31, 2008
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This is a paper under discussion at the Nature Network forum for good, clearly written papers.
SLAC1 is required for plant guard cell S-type anion channel function in stomatal signalling
Triin Vahisalu et al.
Nature 452, 487-491 (27 March 2008) | doi:10.1038/nature06608.
Download PDF here

To discuss this paper, please visit the Nature Network good paper journal club.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on March 27, 2008
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Professor Linda Cooper writes at her Time for a Change blog on Nature Network about initiatives in which authors write a one-page initial summary to explain their research paper to a wide audience. She makes the argument that clearer writing of the paper itself serves a better purpose, for the following reasons:
Scientists need to communicate clearly --"when scientists write manuscripts that accurately communicate their important findings, then everyone benefits including the researcher’s colleagues, educated readers, science journalists, and civil society. In other words, it isn’t the journalist’s role to reinterpret a scientist’s writing; scientists should learn how to communicate effectively in the first place."
Explain specialized terminology -- "a relatively easy thing to do. More egregious are articles that contain lapses in logic, assumptions about what readers know, and omissions of essential information. These issues can be easily addressed by careful editing" [by the journal office].
Compressed language -- "it’s not obvious why this should necessarily lead to poor writing. Several editing techniques exist to make writing more efficient by eliminating clutter and simplifying awkward constructions. Better editing also gives the writer space to include information that is essential for the non-specialist to understand the author’s story."

The crucial question is whether research articles can be made more accessible. Professor Cooper writes that "little will be gained if researchers fail to conquer errors of style and are simply made to write more. Greater effort by both authors and journals – rather than Authors’ Summaries – will go a long way to increasing a paper’s readability. Authors could do more to revise their manuscripts while journals could apply more rigorous writing standards. Delaying the publication of papers until they meet established criteria for clear and accessible writing could provide a strong incentive for scientists to write with greater care."
Please add your views to those being expressed by scientists at Time for a Change blog.
In addition, Dr Martin Fenner and Dr Richard Grant have started a 'good paper journal club' at Nature Network, to promote good scientific writing by posting examples of well-written papers, and by discussion of these papers. Please do join this group, add examples of papers you consider to be well-written, and comment on those examples arlready under discussion.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on March 18, 2008
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For discussion at the Nature Network good paper journal club.

Holocene dwarf mammoths from Wrangel Island in the Siberian Arctic -- download article as PDF

Nature 362, 337 - 340 (25 March 1993); doi:10.1038/362337a0
Holocene dwarf mammoths from Wrangel Island in the Siberian Arctic
S. L. Vartanyan*, V. E. Garutt† & A. V. Sher‡
*Wrangel Island State Reserve, 686870 Ushakovskoye, Magadan Region, Russia
†Zoological Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, 1 Universitetskaya naberezhnaya, 199034 St Petersburg, Russia
‡Severtsov Institute of Evolutionary Animal Morphology and Ecology, Russian Academy of Sciences, 33 Leninskiy Prospect, 117071 Moscow, Russia
THE cause of extinction of the woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius (Blumenbach), is still debated. A major environmental change at the Pleistocene–Holocene boundary, hunting by early man, or both together are among the main explanations that have been suggested. But hardly anyone has doubted that mammoths had become extinct everywhere by around 9,500 years before present (BP). We report here new discoveries on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean that force this view to be revised. Along with normal-sized mammoth fossils dating to the end of the Pleistocene, numerous teeth of dwarf mammoth dated 7,000–4,000 yr BP have been found there. The island is thought to have become separated from the mainland by 12,000 yr BP. Survival of a mammoth population may be explained by local topography and climatic features, which permitted relictual preservation of communities of steppe plants. We interpret the dwarfing of the Wrangel mammoths as a result of the insularity effect, combined with a response to the general trend towards unfavourable environment in the Holocene.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on March 17, 2008
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A few useful links and some weekend light reading suggestions via Nature Network:

Who's got an opinion on public engagement with science? asks Nature Network London editor Matt Brown.

An overview of science-related "stuff" at Second Life, by T. Troy McGonaghy of Science in the Metaverse. Via the link, you can see the slides and a video of Troy's presentation at the recent Virtual Worlds: Libraries, Education and Museums conference.

On the Visualization and Science forum, Hilary Spencer posts what she calls a "rant" about powerpoint, public speaking and blog posts. I'd define it as a strongly opinionated article: it contains her reactions to presentations at a recent conference she attended, and provides some useful advice about how to make and how not to make helpful slides. In a post with a related theme, Nuruddeen Lewis at his blog Lab Daze provides a very useful primer about how to give a talk: 'Tips for nailing your next presentation'.

Martin Fenner on his excellent blog Gobbledygook writes on the "complicated" aspects of paper writing: all those policy and format requirements, ethical bodies' requirements, and international nomenclature committees' pronouncements. And Richard Grant, at The Scientist blog, hosts a discussion on writing style: 'On the care and training of students, especially the training.'

Stew at Flags and Lollipops picks up on various recent posts and articles about the lack of take-up among scientists of the online commenting facilities often offered by journals on the papers they publish. Stew takes previous suggestions with a pinch of salt, homing in on the two main reasons he believes inhibit people from writing comments on published papers.

LabLit publishes the first installment of Private Investigations, a four-part story about the adventures of a very special scientist-for-hire. The author? He or she is not unknown to Nature Network, as a small amount of detective work will reveal.

What is the best way forward for Eastern Europe's science? asks Mico Tatalovic at Cambridge Student blog, in an article featuring the new life-sciences institutue MedILS at Split, Croatia.

If you are in reach of London, there are some unusual science-related events coming up, listed by Li-Kim Lee (see links for further details): Elizabethan Sea Charts and Maps (behind the scenes); Francis Crick - DNA and beyond; Leonardo's philosophical anatomies; and my favourite, Prince Rupert, Cavalier and Scientist.

Today (14 March, which in the US style is 3.14) is Pi day; see Gobbledygook for links to the Pi day website, but also to some music, including the American Pi song -- as Martin points out, best listened to at 1:59 today.

And finally, again from Matt Brown, Nature Network's ten most prolific bloggers over the past six months, with links to the blogs concerned. They'll give you a good taste of the lively discussion on the network - do join us there.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on March 14, 2008
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Frank Gannon in his EMBO Reports editorial this month (9, 207; 2008), Language barriers, writes about the stark contrast between his own ability to write in English and "the difficulties faced by scientists for whom English is a second language, and who have to cope with the much more restricted style of a scientific report." Dr Gannon goes on to discuss the differences between standard English language and the arcane, depersonalised style favoured by (or taught to) many when writing scientific reports, quoting the view that "the public would not bother to read scientific papers even if the journals were lying around for free, simply because scientific prose is largely unreadable for the non-expert—and often only barely readable for the expert."
Although English seems set to be the main language of science for the foreseeable future, it is worth noting that the Nature journals do encourage authors to use direct, plain prose. Our subeditors and copyeditors help authors of accepted manuscripts who are not native English speakers, and we provide advice on our website which we hope will be useful to scientists preparing a paper before submission to one of our journals. Advice is also available at Nature Network, for example at Linda Cooper's excellent advice blog Time for a change, and Ai Lin Chun's forum Nature Nanotechnology -- Asia Pacific and beyond.

See related article in the same issue of EMBO Reports as the Editorial discussed here:
Six senses in the literature: the bleak sensory landscape of biomedical texts by Raul Rodriguez-Esteban and Andrey Rzhetsky (EMBO R. 9, 212–215; 2008).

Posted by Maxine Clarke on March 11, 2008
Categories: Publishing, Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via Scott Keir on Nature Network:
Today (Thursday 6 March 2008) is World Book Day in the UK. Elsewhere in the world, the day falls on 23 April, traditionally held to be the anniversary of Shakespeare's birth and death -- but on this later date, the target audience of school students is usually on vacation in the UK.
Scott suggests that scientists with blogs, on Nature Network or elsewhere, write today about science books. And wearing his hat as manager for science book prizes at the Royal Society, Scott is offering to give a book to five people who write about science books on their blogs today. Henry Gee, on his Network blog End of the Pier Show, has followed suit by offering copies of his book Jacob's Ladder: The History of the Human Genome, to the first few people who drop him a comment.
Scott has started the process of writing about books with an entertaining story about science books that have changed his life on his Network blog Mixed miscellanies. And Brian Clegg, on his Network blog PopSci, writes about how SF stimulated his interest in science.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on March 06, 2008
Categories: Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

Senior Nature editor Henry Gee writes on Nature Network's Ask the Editor forum about writing a scientific paper.

"In my experience, the best-written submissions to Nature come from people whose first language is not English – and who have therefore been taught English, properly, as it no longer is in England........I had a paper recently that was written in a most peculiar way, so much so that I had to turn to the author list – and found that both authors were English, working in England. In general, though, Nature editors aren’t looking for English that is beautiful (though it’s nice when it happens) but English that is comprehensible and clear, and whose meaning is unambiguous. If you are attempting to write in clear English, I find it’s best to adopt a few simple rules: the same rules that journalists use to improve the clarity of their prose." Here are Henry's rules:

1. Look at the lengths of your sentences. If you can split them into shorter sentences, do so.
2. Don’t use words or phrases in print that you wouldn’t use in conversation: write as you would speak. I find that if you’ve written something and you think it doesn’t make sense, speak it out loud. If it still seems like it doesn’t make sense, then it probably doesn’t.
3. Use simple sentence constructions that start at the beginning and progress in a stately and linear way to the end.
4. Avoid relative clauses.
5. Avoid the use of double negatives (cell biologists absolutely adore double negatives).
6. Avoid compound nouns (ditto).
7. Avoid neologisms (very popular in the United States).
8. Avoid creative-writing classes.
9. Audit English Literature classes. When looking for models of good writing, study writers who could really write. If you are English, read Jane Austen. If in the United States, read Hemingway.

The Nature Nanotechnology group Asia-Pacific and beyond (also on Nature Network) features some technical style tips with examples of how to shorten sentences, and lazy phrases to avoid. There is also excellent advice, including worked examples, at Time for a Change, the blog of Linda Cooper.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 22, 2008
Categories: Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

Four Nature Network bloggers feature in an anthology of selected science blog posts of 2007, Open Laboratory 2007. Out of more than 450 nominated entries, 52 were chosen for publication, including these from Nature Network bloggers:
Deanne Taylor, a research scientist with the Harvard School of Public Health, describes what changes need to be made to boost faculty diversity in science.
Kristin Stephan, a Tufts graduate student, discusses how difficult, but necessary, it is for PhD students in grad school to learn about careers outside academic science.
Henry Gee writes about how his 9-year-old daughter's Asperger's syndrome might help her become a good scientist.
Jennifer Rohn, a postdoc at University College London, documents in a series of four posts her return to the lab and academic science after four years as a journal editor. Required reading for anyone contemplating a career change.
In a short review of the book in Nature's 24 January issue (Nature 451, 401; 2008), Nature's Books and Arts editor Joanne Baker wrote: "If you are overwhelmed by the surge in science-related blogging and don't know where to start, then this compilation may help you steer a course through the sea of perspectives on offer — or inspire you to start a blog yourself."
The book is available either as a PDF or a printed paperback, from Lulu.com.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 08, 2008
Categories: Author benefits, Awards, Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

Martijn J. Schuemie and Jan A. Kors (Bioinformatics doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btn006 ) have created a freely available web-based application that, on the basis of a sample text, can suggest "journals and experts who have published similar articles". Their aim is to help scientists to determine which journal is most appropriate for publishing their results, and which other scientists can be called upon to review their work. The application is called Jane (for journal/author name estimator).
I inputted some sample text to Jane, and was told that the Saudi Medical Journal was my top choice. No disrespect to that journal, but I know (because I am a person and not a computer) that this journal would be inappropriate for my test sample in at least two ways.
I would not primarily recommend an automatic selector to authors trying to decide where to submit their articles. When someone is ready to submit a paper, she or he will have given talks about the work and circulated drafts for comments from others in the field. That is a good time to ask for suggestions and advice about journals in which to publish. The scientist is then well-advised to read the author guidance on a few journals' websites, to find out about editorial scope, impact factor and so on.
I think it is possibly counter-productive to use this kind of text-based comparison system on its own for making decisions about journal submission. At Nature, for example, we are looking for novel results, not something similar to what we have just published. Other journals are the same – most of them are looking for distinctive articles, not incremental repeats.
Rather than relying on computer searches to choose where to submit, I highly recommend looking at our free Author and Reviewers’ website for writing and submission advice. From there one can go straight to a great set of articles written by professional journal editors about how, where and why to submit and publish at the free science-information website SciDev.Net.
In addition, scientists can upload a draft manuscript into a community preprint server, where others in the field can comment and suggest. (Nature Precedings is one such, which provides meta-features such as alerting people in the field when new preprints have been uploaded, but many others. ArXiv is another, for the physical sciences.)
I think it will be a sad day when science journals publish “articles selected for us by computer”.
(I first read about Jane at Nature Network in a post by Graham Steel.)

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 31, 2008
Categories: Author services, Publishing, Writing | Permalink | Comments (2)

Martin Fenner, on his Nature Network blog Gobbledygook, notes that The Deutsche Ärzteblatt , the official journal of the German Medical Association, will from this month be publishing an English version. The reason? So that the journal is more clearly indexed in databases such as PubMed, hence available to more readers, leading to more citations of journal articles, a better Impact Factor, and enhanced reputation of the journal. Martin's opinion is that although German was once an important scientific language, today only 2 per cent of articles indexed in Medline are in the language. "In the end", he writes, " it makes the exchange of ideas between scientists much easier if we can all use the same language. And Nature Network is a good example for this."
In the stimulating discussion arising from the post, Nicolau Werneck comments that "to this day there are a bunch of interesting words and expressions from German that came into the international scientific jargon in the last 2 centuries, such as gedankenexperiment, eigenvector and gestalt…We must fight. But not to forbid people from talking in english, or other imperialistic arrogant language, and certainly not to make them speak only in English. We must fight for the plurality of languages."
Nicholas Wigginton's view is that of someone considering a postdoc in a country where English is not an official language. "Although the science that the groups I am looking into publish everything in English, some operate their labs in the national language whereas others prefer their science to be done exclusively in science. I find this very interesting."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 25, 2008
Categories: Citation analysis, Format, Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

Following on a successful inaugural year of Postdoc Journal, Naturejobs is pleased to announce the launch of an international competition to select new writers for 2008.
The Postdoc Journal gives four postdoctoral fellows the opportunity to each write a monthly journal entry for Naturejobs. These writers will chart their ups and downs over the course of a year and describe how their experiences shape their future career choices. Some occasional blogging may be requested as well.
We ask that applicants provide three things:
--A cover letter saying why you want to be considered and what would make you a good journal keeper. Include your institutional affiliation, general area of research, the focus of your graduate degree, and how long you've been a postdoc.
--A sample first entry, 250 words long, that introduces yourself, identifies the biggest career question you will face in the upcoming year and how you plan to search for an answer.
--Your CV.
Deadline for applications is 17 December 2007. See here for previous journal entries.
The applicants will be judged by a panel including Naturejobs editorial staff and past postdoc journal keepers. Applicants must commit to submitting monthly for one year regardless of any changes in student or employment status. Please email the cover letter, sample entry and CV as Word document attachments to this address..
In the subject line, write 'postdoc journal contest' and state the country you are based in and your discipline (example: postdoc journal contest, Canada, cell biology).

Posted by Maxine Clarke on November 28, 2007
Categories: Careers, Writing | Permalink | Comments (1)

Michael Kenward starts a debate in Nature Network's science writers' group called Science experiments in accessibility, in which he highlights the journal Science's trial project of starting each Research Article with a one-page author's summary. Michael sees two benefits for science writers: one, to help authors to produce accessible summaries; and another to use the summaries to write more easily and confidently about the research.
Following this post is an online discusssion about the benefits to the reader of different types of summary which you may find stimulating, and to which you are welcome to contribute, or comment here. Typical summaries provided by journals range from News and Views-style editorials (articles by independent scientists in the field about a new finding), to short author summaries, to "making the paper" (interviews with an author featured on Nature's author page in the journal every week), to "inside the paper" (editors' accounts of how the paper evolved from submission to acceptance during the peer-review process) to one-paragraph editors' summaries, to science journalism, to blog posts, to podcasts. What kind of reader finds what kind of summary most useful? Would authors welcome the additional task of writing one-page summaries?

Posted by Maxine Clarke on November 21, 2007
Categories: Author services, Authorship, Communication, Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

Plus has teamed up with Nature to bring maths to the Nature Network. Plus's blog calls Nature Network a "stage for science discussion, allowing scientists to meet, interact, comment on the latest news, debate current topics or exchange information. Members can create groups for their own labs or organisations, or for their own subject area. The mathematics forum is now brought to you by Plus. We're aiming to provide a platform for anyone who wants to discuss maths, whether it's actual maths, maths teaching, the portrayal of maths in the media, or good and bad maths content elsewhere on the internet." Plus is also organising a science writing competition, open to new writers who can explain a mathematical topic or application they think the world needs to know about. The winning entries will be published in the June 2008 issue of Plus, and the winners will receive an iPod and signed copies of popular maths books. Closing date 31 March 2008.

About Plus: "Plus is an internet magazine which aims to introduce readers to the beauty and the practical applications of mathematics. Plus provides feature articles, which describe applications of maths to real-world problems, games, and puzzles; reviews of popular maths books and events; a news section, showing how recent news stories were often based on some underlying piece of maths that never made it to the newspapers; a puzzle for you to sharpen your wits against; a lucky dip of mathematical curiosities; and opinions on various maths-related topics and news stories. We have a regular interview with someone in a maths-related career, showing the wide range of uses maths gets put to in the real world. And all past issues remain available online, which besides making for good browsing is, we hope, a useful resource for maths school students and teachers."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on November 08, 2007
Categories: Disciplines, Partners, Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the Nature Nanotechnolgy forum on Nature Network, editor Ai Lin Chun asks readers what they mean by the term "nano" technology. She writes about the manuscripts recently submitted to the journal that, although interesting, "were hardly in the nano regime. For example, fibers that were 400-600 nm were called nanofibers." She asks whether we are diluting the term ‘nano’, and if so, why? How strict/flexible should we be? Some peer-reviewers of these papers indicated that even though the materials were 400-600 nm, the work is in their opinion publishable because it is interesting and thorough. The ensuing debate is well worth a look -- please add your own answers and definition of what you consider to be nanoscale.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on November 07, 2007
Categories: Writing | Permalink | Comments (1)

Nature is now able to accept Word 2007 files, provided that they are authored from the beginning in "Compatibility Mode", that is, as a Word 97-2003 document and saved in .doc format. We cannot accept files in .docx format, so please do not write the paper as a Word 2007 document then save as a Word 97-2003 document. The resaons for the earlier compatibility problems with Word 2007 experienced by publishers, and the efforts made by them, their suppliers of production technologies, and Microsoft, to resolve these, are discussed in this earlier Nautilus post.
The details of how to format a submission in Word 2007 are described in Nature's Guide to Authors:
Using Word 2007 to produce a Nature paper
Open a new document.
Turn on ‘Compatibility Mode’: click the Microsoft Office button, Save As ‘Word 97-2003 document’.
Note that some features of Word 2007 will now be inactive, including the default equation editor. See this Microsoft page for details.
Copy and paste the Word 2003 template (available at the Nature website) into the open document, and write the paper.
NB To put in equations, use Insert/Object/Microsoft Equation 3.0.
To put in symbols such as Greek letters, use Insert/Symbol; we recommend using Symbol font.
Save As ‘Word 97-2003 document’.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on October 03, 2007
Categories: Author services, Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

Blogs invade The Scientist: vote for your favorite life science blog! ? Pimm - Partial immortalization

Attila Csordas of the blog Partial Immortalization draws attention (see above) to an article in The Scientist asking readers to nominate their favourite life-science blogs. To start the process, The Scientist asked seven science bloggers -- five who blog on the SEED platform and two independent science bloggers (Ed Silverman and Attila Csordas) to make some recommendations. These, as well as the many nominations received at The Scientist, will provide the curious scientific reader with plenty of online food for thought.
However, as Euan Adie points out at Nascent, The Scientist's article is incorrect to state that there is no guide to which science blogs to read (or indeed, where they are). As mentioned the other day on Nautilus in relation to books, Postgenomic is a free-access website which collects posts from hundreds of blogs and does interesting things with those data. Whether you're a reader, a blogger or a publisher, there are interesting and useful features on Postgenomic that I recommend trying out. Here, for example, are science blogs organised by subject and ordered by popularity. Another science-blog tracker and analyser is Chemical Blogspace.
Last year, Nature measured the "top" five science blogs indexed in Technorati (a search engine which measures the number of links to and from all blogs, not just scientific ones) and asked the bloggers concerned the reasons for their success. You can read their answers here. You can also read Nature's review of blogger Bora Zivkovic's collection of science writing on blogs,The Open Laboratory, here (Nature 447, 779; 2007).

Posted by Maxine Clarke on September 27, 2007
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October 2007 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication in the Australian Journal of Science of Frank Macfarlane Burnet's clonal selection theory, an intellectual framework that revolutionized the field of immunology.
Nature Immunology celebrates the event in an editorial (Nature Immunology 8, 1009; 2007) and a historical Commentary by Philip Hodgkin, William Heath and Alan Baxter (Nature Immunology 8, 1019-1026; 2007). Accompanying this Commentary is the two-page manuscript from the Australian Journal of Science in which Frank Macfarlane Burnet presented clearly for the first time the ideas that underlie the modern science of immunology (reprinted with permission from the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science).
Nature Reviews Immunology celebrates the achievement by a Viewpoint article in which Melvin Cohn, N. Av Mitchison, William E. Paul, Arthur M. Silverstein, David W. Talmage and Martin Weigert, scientists working or who have worked in the field, provide their thoughts and opinions (Nature Reviews Immunology 7, 823-830; 2007).
From the Nature Immunology historical Commentary:

Rarely has a field as large and influential been gathered together and encapsulated in so spare a form. The modern reader can still appreciate the paper's brevity, clarity and masterly exposition of scientific method. It is worth rereading not only for its significant historical importance, but also because we see the individual creative scientist at work. Burnet's personal ambition to solve the problem of antibody specificity is clear, and he leaves plenty of clues for us to trace the evolution of the ideas that led to his solution and identify the colleagues who helped in its formulation. There is also mystery associated with the paper, such as why it is in such an obscure journal and what David Talmage's impact was on Burnet's ideas. Speculation on these issues has kept interest in the paper high over the decades.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on September 27, 2007
Categories: Publications, Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

How geneticists can help reporters to get their story right : Article : Nature Reviews Genetics

This article, by Celeste M. Condit of the University of Georgia, Athens, addresses the disgruntlement that many geneticists experience when they read, see or hear coverage of genetics in the mass media. Dr Condit describes how geneticists themselves can play their part in improving that coverage by explaining the forces that shape science news. Her article provides some specific options for reducing hype, countering genetic determinism and preventing the use of genetics to reinforce discriminatory messages: slants that many reporters are inclined to give to their articles.

The full article is available in Nature Reviews Genetics 8, 815-820 (October 2007).

Posted by Maxine Clarke on September 26, 2007
Categories: Public and media, Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature Methods' September Editorial, A 'rough guide' to publication (Nature Methods 4, 675; 2007) describes the process of submitting or resubmitting a manuscript—some important steps and decisions along the way.

The path to publication is a well-beaten one for some scientists but seems more like a dark, unmarked road to others. It helps to know what to expect from peer review (see our May 2006 editorial), but a number of other procedural steps often cause disorientation as well. Here are some trail blazes and travel advice.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on September 19, 2007
Categories: Author services, Publishing, Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

Larry Benson of the Chief Arid Regions Climate Project in Boulder, Colorado, writes in this week's Correspondence in Nature 449, 24 (6 September 2007):
Until the past few years, both Nature and Science confined their articles and letters to a rather small number of words. This was both good and bad; good in that the articles were short and to the point; bad in that it eliminated studies that were complex. I first thought that the Supplementary Information sections were a great idea. Here was a way to place at the readers' disposal important data (tables or figures) that were necessary background to the work, but not necessary to the reading and understanding of the paper.
However, some recent articles refute my thinking. One or two have contained tens of pages of this supplementary material, essential to the reading and understanding of the article. Ten pages of Supplementary Information are not unusual, and the average for Nature is about five pages.
I suggest either that you either publish hard-copy papers whole and integrated in a long form, or publish them whole and integrated on the web, as you now do with Methods sections.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on September 05, 2007
Categories: Publishing, Writing | Permalink | Comments (14)

Nature Publishing Group (NPG)'s Chief Technology Officer, Howard Ratner, has posted an update on Nascent (NPG's web publishing blog) about Microsoft Word 2007 (DOC X) for authors writing for science, technology and medicine (STM) publications.
Howard hosted a meeting on 25 July 2007 at the NPG office in New York for staff from Microsoft, the American Institute of Physics, the American Geophysical Union, Science, Inera (producers of the eXtyles automatic editing tool), Aries (in this context, producers of manuscript tracking systems) and NPG. The publishing participants provided a high-level overview of the various stages involved in a typical journal's publication process, from the author writing the manuscript, through submission to publication, including a quick overview of the types of software systems and standards used to aid in these workflows. This was then followed up by presentations from Inera and Aries detailing the problems Word 2007 is causing for editing tools and manuscript tracking systems.
In his Nascent post, Howard details some of the outcomes of this fruitful meeting:
--Microsoft will establish a page on one of its websites with more advanced details on how to best use Word 2007 in a publishing environment. (For example, an image of an equation created when saving a Word 2007 file to Word 2003 carries semantic information that can be reused when reopening in Word 2007 file.)
--Microsoft will consider adding text to its help file with Word 2007 especially about its Math Markup Language Support.
--Microsoft will educate publishers by more frequent presentations at publisher events.
Howard also provides links to more information of use to authors, including this summary by Bruce Rosenblum of Inera, and this set of Connotea bookmarks on DOC X , to which you can add.
Nature is currently testing Word 2007 manuscripts in its editorial production system. If you are using Word 2007 and have a sample manuscript (created from scratch in Word 2007) that you can send us, please do so, as an attachment, to the authors' email address. We are particularly interested in equation-heavy manuscripts, as our experience is that equations and symbols (Greek letters and so on) provide the most stringent test.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on September 05, 2007
Categories: Publishing, Writing | Permalink | Comments (2)

Two contrasting views on puns in science reporting are expressed in Nature's Correspondence pages. First, Jeff Craig of the Royal Children's Hospital, Victoria, Australia (Nature448, 864-865; 2007) writes: I beg to differ with Renée M. Ned and Lisa N. Steele's Correspondence 'Slang's not so slick when you remember its origins' (Nature 447, 775; 2007) about the use of the word 'pimp' in a News Feature headline ('Pimp my antibody' Nature 446, 964–966; 2007).
The word first appeared in sixteenth-century France as the verb pimper, meaning 'to dress elegantly', and as the adjective pimpant, 'alluring in dress, seductive'. In the seventeenth century, the word was associated with 'a knave, rascal, varlet, scoundrel', according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. The vulgar modern meaning probably derives from a combination of these. The sense in which it is used by the television show Pimp My Ride could imply dressing an automobile elegantly — admittedly with a hint of flashy style.
I personally find the use of puns, colloquialisms and cultural references more objectionable, as they are likely to be understandable to only a fraction of Nature's global readership. The English language is sufficiently complex without the need to understand these sometimes obscure references in the headlines of Nature News stories and other similar articles.
A quick scan of a few issues yields: "...over a pork barrel"; "Oceanography: Churn, churn, churn"; "...science in premier league"; "State of the donation"; "Astrophysics: The answer is blowing in the wind"; "Scot on the rocks"; and "The silence of the robins". As a native English speaker I may understand and appreciate these, but many others wouldn't.

Milan Hopkins, of Upper Lake, California, on the other hand, writes (Nature 448, 865; 2007): Beyond the excellence of the scientific reporting, I particularly enjoy the entertaining use of language and the enlightened levity of Nature. Consequently, I am somewhat concerned by the complaint of R. M. Ned and L. N. Steele ('Slang's not so slick when you remember its origins' Nature 447, 775; 2007) regarding the use of the verb 'pimp', because of its "immoral origins".
Should I take offence because the use of the terms 'wimp' and 'macho' to denote putative particles might perpetuate negative stereotyping of my gender?
The freedom and, especially, the humour of scientific reporting may be hindered by misguided attempts to avoid offending moralists.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on August 28, 2007
Categories: Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

Steven Shapin of the Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, discusses the art of persuasion in scientific writing in his review of the book The Scientific Literature: A Guided Tour, edited by Joseph E. Harmon and Alan G. Gross (University of Chicago Press). From his review:

"While the term 'scientific literature' is a commonplace usage, few scientists would acknowledge any connection between how they write and the works of novelists or poets. As long ago as the middle of the seventeenth century, the English originators of the scientific journal vigorously set themselves against all forms of fancy writing. The newly formed Royal Society of London separated "the knowledge of Nature...from the colours of Rhetorick". The aim of scientific writing was to report, whereas rhetoric worked to distort. Today, few scientists consider themselves to be rhetoricians. How many even know the meaning of anaphora, antimetabole or litotes?
But it's not that simple. The scientific literature reports, but it also aims to persuade readers that what it reports is reliable and significant. And the arts of persuasion are inevitably literary and, specifically, rhetorical."

"The accelerating incomprehensibility of scientific writing to the average educated person is not merely the fault of the much-lamented 'public ignorance of science'. Specialists have been so successful in constructing and bounding their own audiences that they rarely feel any need to address the laity or even scientists in other disciplines. Indeed, the plant physiologist is likely to be just as poorly equipped as any non-scientist to read a paper on superconductivity."

The complete review is in Nature 448, 751-752 (2007).
The Nature journals' advice on scientific writing can be found at our author and referees' website.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on August 24, 2007
Categories: Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

For advice about how to get your stem cell paper in Nature, senior editor Natalie DeWitt, will answer your questions about how the editorial process works, common misconceptions and other topics in the stem-cell field. Please send Natalie an email containing your question.

Highlights from this month's Nature Reports Stem Cells include:

California stem-cell research: assessing return on investment
Read our commentary by Stanford researcher Michael T. Longaker that explores how Californians can figure out whether its landmark, debt-funded investment in stem-cell research will pay off.
Why are recipients of California stem-cell grants using lines that are eligible for federal funding?
A Nature Reports Stem Cell survey of researchers examines the grants designed to bring new researchers into the stem-cell field.
Bureaucracy blocks work on embryonic stem cells in Japan
Kyoto University's Norio Nakatsuji argues that irrational regulations stifle research in his country.
What experiments should be legal on animal-human chimaeras?
With new legislation covering the use of animal-human chimeras in the works in the United Kingdom, Nature Reports Stem Cells summarizes the report from the UK Academy of Medical Sciences.
Embryonic stem cells for drug discovery
In Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, experts from Monash University describe the advances needed to make assays feasible.
Also read about a survey finding that most fertility patients would donate left-over embryos for stem-cell research and the latest news and views on engineered pluripotent stem cells from Nature.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on August 14, 2007
Categories: Author services, Publishing, Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

Q: What is the endnote alternative the editing office at Nature uses? I heard about it on a blog but I can't seem to remember its name.

A: Nature does not use Endnote, which is a commercially available Word macro for styling reference lists for a range of journals and publishers. Nature and its typesetter use eXtyles (produced by a company called Inera) and their own technical system for reference styling which is not compatible with Endnote's. If an author wants to use Endnote for reference styling when preparing a manuscript, we ask him or her to strip out the Endnote macros after the references are styled and before submitting the manuscript. Instructions are on the Nature submission template.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on August 07, 2007
Categories: Policies Feedback, Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Let's see: plane ticket, sun block, toothbrush, mp3 player – you are all set for a summer break. Wait, some reading? Well, here comes the dilemma between the latest page-turner and the pile of research article PDFs on your desk. Why not compromise and pack a good popular science book?" So starts the July editorial in Nature Methods (4, 535; 2007), aptly entitled "summer reading". What follows is an eclectic sample of the editors' reading lists. If you have some favourites to add, please do so at Methagora, the Nature Methods blog, which also carries an extended list of "staff picks".

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 27, 2007
Categories: General, Public and media, Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

Clarity and obfuscation in scientific papers is the title of a post by Dr Free-Ride (a.k.a. philosophy professor Janet Stemwedel). The post isn't as dry as it may seem from its title, as it draws attention to this list of common statements in scientific writing, and what they really mean. Examples are along the lines of:

"It is generally believed that"
I think this and at least one other person agrees with me.

"Additional work will be required to elucidate the mechanism"
I don't have a clue what is going on and I'm not going to be the one to figure it out.

While acknowledging the humour in the list, Dr Free-Ride asks why some people use words "whose meaning is distant from the truth" in their scientific writing, and how this relates to the "reward structure" for scientists.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 23, 2007
Categories: Writing | Permalink | Comments (1)

Futures is the award-winning science-fiction section of Nature, now currently running in Nature's monthly sister title, Nature Physics.
Futures is returning to Nature this week, in the 5 July 2007 issue, as a weekly back-page feature, as well as continuing each month in Nature Physics. The Futures column in each journal will forge its own identity: a story in one journal will not be reprinted in the other, although authors are free to express a preference and choose for which journal their story should be considered.
Although contributions are sometimes commissioned, unsolicited stories are welcome for both journals. Each story should be an entirely fictional, original, self-contained piece between 850-950 words in length, and the genre should, broadly speaking, be 'hard' (that is, 'scientific' SF) rather than, say, outright fantasy, slipstream or horror.
Each item should be sent as a Word (.doc) attachment to futures@nature.com, giving full contact details along with a brief (approximately 30-word) autobiographical squib that could be appended to the story if published. Unsolicited artwork is not considered. Presubmission enquiries are discouraged: instead, prospective authors are advised to read earlier Futures stories in Nature, Nature Physics and selected examples available here for free. Please do not send multiple submissions. Reprints of stories published elsewhere are not considered.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 04, 2007
Categories: Author services, Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

Small changes that work for writer and reader - Time for a change - Linda Cooper's blog on Nature Network

In her Nature Network blog Time for a Change (click on the underlined sentence above), Linda Cooper provides suggestions to help researchers marshal their data into a coherent story; such suggestions also help readers because a logically structured account of the significant finding is so much easier for them to understand than a random or semi-structured compilation of data. In the post linked to above, Linda provides tips that relate to the structure and content of a manuscript, beginning with the paper Abstract.

Linda provides specific advice if you comment at her blog. For example, Kathryn Holt asks: "I would be interested to read your posts on any of the topics you suggest, but in particular I’d like to hear your thoughts on “how to transform convoluted sentences into sentences where ideas shine through”. This can seem a very difficult task, especially when the writer has in their own mind a great many details behind every statement they make, and indeed is expected to provide evidence for all their claims." And Linda replies:" I’ve deconstructed the Abstract to your paper on “Multidrug-resistant Salmonella enterica serovar Paratyphi A” and would be happy to give you some editing suggestions.."

Time for a Change provides several very useful posts on how to write a clear scientific manuscript, so please do check it out. A clearly written paper is better understood by editors and readers, and is likely to have more impact after it is published.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 21, 2007
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In a post entitled Nascent: Word 2007 and the STM Publisher Ecosystem, Howard Ratner, Chief Technical Officer of Nature Publishing Group, writes about how he has become involved in "a very lively conversation with Microsoft staff about why Word 2007 is not being actively endorsed by STM publishers. It has recently come to Microsoft's attention that Nature , Science and many other scholarly publishers do not accept files from authors in Word 2007. Both Science and Nature Publishing Group have been in correspondence with Microsoft staff on this important issue. The staff there have been very willing to engage in this conversation."

The rest of Howard's Nascent post is the text of a letter to Microsoft by Bruce Rosebaum of Inera, which well explains the issues for science and technical publishers attempting to integrate this format with their typesetting and web coding systems. The letter concludes: "Those of us in the scientific community look forward to a dialog to articulate scholarly publishing requirements to Microsoft so that Microsoft can provide products that serve the needs of the entire scholarly community."

James McQuat, London Nature journals' Editorial Production Director, draws attention to an article by Margaret Heffernan at The Huffington Post, one of the world's most popular blogs, on this issue. It is a much more upfront analysis of the situation, but encapsulates it well.

In a comment to the Nascent post, Bruce D'Arcus writes: "There's another issue with backwards compatibility for scholarly workflows. Word 2007 supports new citation and bibliography fields. But if you open such files in previous versions of Word, the fields are converted to plain text. This means scholarly collaboration becomes impossible unless all parties are using Word 2007. I'm sure MS thought this a smart business decision, but I beg to differ. I think it'll mean many scholar won't bother with Word 2007, or its citation features."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 21, 2007
Categories: Policies, Publishing, Writing | Permalink | Comments (1)

Excerpted from Nature 447, 779 (2007).
Paul Stevenson reviews the book The Open Laboratory: The Best Writing on Science Blogs 2006,
edited by Bora Zivkovic. Lulu: 2007. 336 pp. $19.85, £10.99
The Open Laboratory is a collection of writing from science blogs, selected and published by the energetic biologist-blogger Bora Zivkovic with the help of the blogging community. In the run-up to the first conference of science bloggers earlier this year in North Carolina, Zivkovic took it upon himself to collate the fifty best posts put up by the end of 2006. Topics include micro black holes, bird migration, human sleep patterns, evolution, quantum mechanics and psychology. The writing ranges from PhD students enthusing about concepts from their research areas, to opinion pieces on themes such as the rights and wrongs of particle-physics funding, intelligent design and political interference in science policy.
This wide-ranging book provides something — hopefully many things — for everyone. Particularly enjoyable is browsing entries about areas of science away from one's own research interests. As a physicist, I learned a lot about the origin of mitochondria from the representative entry of Carl Zimmer's award-winning blog The Loom. I was pleased, too, to see entries from some of the highly trafficked blogs that I habitually read and enjoy, such as The Panda's Thumb and Cocktail Party Physics.
By their nature, blogs are dynamic. A post typically bristles with links out to elsewhere on the web and accretes an ever-changing exchange of comments between readers and the author. To capture this energy and texture in a static book is a challenge that the editor fully acknowledges in his introduction. The solution Zivkovic fixes on for The Open Laboratory is to pick posts that he feels work in isolation, to list links as footnotes and to omit the comment strings.
The entries highlight the great variety of styles that can thrive in the blogosphere. Most of the pieces are a little chattier than the usual book or magazine article, but those chosen are formal enough not to grate on the printed page. Occasionally, the prose is loftier than a typical popular science book. Some even veer too much towards the tone of a research article — leaving terms like suprachiasmatic nucleus or a zygomaticomaxillary suture unexplained.
The book works well enough as a standalone anthology of science writing, but I share the editor's hope that it will prompt eager print readers hitherto unfamiliar with the vibrant young medium that is science blogging to have a look, and maybe even have a go. Nominations for next year's anthology are already being sought.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 14, 2007
Categories: Awards, Public and media, Publishing, Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

Free Association: Selfish factoids

Why do editors prune appealing afterthoughts and out of focus information to leave only the highly-scrutinized core of the research paper?, asks Myles Axton, Chief Editor of Nature Genetics, in the Free Association blog post above. ‘Appealing’ is the key word, that stuff has a life of its own and can literally beg you to add it to your papers. “Add me”, the factoid pleads, “and your work will make it into the news, will get discussed”.

Myles continues: Selfish factoids can even infect Matt Ridley, probably the most accessible and informative science writer alive. I enjoyed reading his “Origins of Virtue- Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation” but found this: Chapter 1, footnote 29. “I am indebted to David Haig for the information that human beings have B chromosomes at the rate of 2-3 per cent of live births.” Myles looked into this assertion, or to put it his way, performed a "reality check". Read on at the Free Association post.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 08, 2007
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Sam at Everyday Scientist blog writes:
We were discussing some grammar at Chemical Physics Journal Club this week: which is the (more) correct sentence?
1. It is important to deconvolute the fluorescence lifetime from the instrument-response function.
2. It is important to deconvolve the fluorescence lifetime from the instrument-response function.
I think sentence 2 is better. To me, “convolve” is to (usu. mathematically) roll together multiple things, while “convolute” means to make complex: you can convolve two mathematical functions or signals, and you can convolute a sentence. (Unfortunately, the noun form of each is “convolution.”)

The consensus in the comments at Everyday Scientist is 'option 2 probably', but dictionaries do not seem to help. Can you?

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 08, 2007
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From the editors of Nature China: Join some of the Nature journal editors for a day of presentations on "how to publish in Nature journals". The meeting is on 11 June at the Shanghai Information Center for Life Sciences Hall, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Registration is free. The line-up includes: David Swinbanks, Publishing Directorof Nature Publishing Group; Philip Campbell, Editor in Chief of Nature;Terry Sheppard, Chief Editor of Nature Chemical Biology; Rachel Won, an Associate Editor of Nature Photonics; Felix Cheung, Associate Editor of Nature China; and Xiaolin Zhang, head of AstraZeneca Innovation Center, China.

For more details and to book your place, send the organisers an email. A second meeting will be held on 9 June 2007 at the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, but registration is full.

The Nature China website highlights the best research coming out of mainland China and Hong Kong, providing scientists from around the world with a convenient portal into publications drawn from across all scientific disciplines. Each week, our editors select the best published research and provide a summary of the results. By organizing this research into a comprehensive, regularly updated, one-stop web portal, we hope to help you quickly reach the resources you need to study, and to keep you up-to-date with the most significant research coming out of mainland China and Hong Kong.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on May 30, 2007
Categories: Communication, Public and media, Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

Henry Gee, senior editor at Nature, adds another string to his bow this week in the form of a serial novel, which he is publishing in installments on the LabLit website. From LabLit: "We are pleased to begin the weekly serialization of an original novel by Henry Gee, By The Sea. Set in present-day Norfolk, Gee blends science, murder, sex and Victorian secrets into a dark, gothic thriller." Here is an excerpt:

Oh God…Morrison. His ideas for rolling out new, re-synthetic natural products. His contacts at MagusPharm that led to her fellowship, buying her. Resource acquisition. Drug discovery. Secrets of the Sea. And none more Secret than at the LPI. And she, fresh from a PhD and a career for the making. Or the taking. How had she let herself come to this? There is nothing for it. She has made her bed, she muses, turning to straighten the duvet, and so she must lie in it. Do the work, fulfil the contract, get out, move on. She puts on her slippers and pads into the horrid, white-chipped, never-quite-cleanable bathroom.

Henry is known to Nature readers and authors as the journal's palaeontology editor, Futures commissioning editor, and Nature Network blogger, to name but three of his current activities.

Lablit.com, "the culture of science in fiction and fact" , is worth checking out for an energetic and imaginitve universe of articles, forums and debates on all aspects of fact and fiction in science culture.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on May 22, 2007
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From Nature's Guide to Authors:
Futures is the award-winning science-fiction section of Nature and Nature Physics. Contributions are usually commissioned, but unsolicited articles are welcome. Each Future should be an entirely fictional, self-contained story between 850-950 words in length, and the genre should, broadly speaking, be 'hard' (that is, 'scientific' SF) rather than, say, outright fantasy, slipstream or horror. Each item should be sent as a Word (.doc) attachment to futures@nature.com, including full contact details and a 30-word autobiographical note to be appended to the story if published. (Please do not send presubmission enquiries, but send the whole story.) Unsolicited artwork is not considered. Before submitting, prospective authors are advised to read earlier Futures columns in Nature and Nature Physics; selected examples are available free, and the whole collection of Futures published in Nature is available here (subscription or site licence required).

Posted by Maxine Clarke on May 16, 2007
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Biji T. Kurien, Yaser Dorri and R. Hal Scofield write:
While it is a fact that editors of scientific journals feel the pinch when authors use redundant prose (see the Correspondence by Cheryl Strauss in Nature 446, 725; 2007), it is also true that authors feel intense pain as a consequence of the differences in the style and format of reference required by many journals, as well as from the lack of general standardization criteria for units.
Many high-impact journals have a low acceptance rate, so most authors have to resend their manuscripts to other journals. At this juncture they are forced to spend long hours to reformat their manuscript to accommodate different submission requirements.
The two main methods of referencing articles in journal and book publications are the Harvard (author-date) and Vancouver (author-number) reference systems, although many journals have their own variants. There are also other reference styles, for example British Standards 1629 and 5605.
The Harvard style uses the author's name and publication date in the body of the text, with the bibliography arranged alphabetically by author. Several universities use variants of this style in their own institutions.
Vancouver style differs from Harvard by using a number series to indicate references. Bibliographies list these in numerical order as they appear in the text. The US National Library of Medicine provides sample references for about 40 different circumstances. Even though several top-tier medical journals use the Vancouver style, it is essential to consult 'Instructions for Authors' for any publication before submitting a paper. The Mulford Library at the Medical College of Ohio, for example, keeps a list of journal instructions to authors for more than 3,000 health sciences journals.
In several journals, in-text numbers cite references in superscript. Some journals require capitalization of titles, even for names, whereas others require author names in bold and yet others require the initials of the first author to be on the right side with initials of subsequent authors on the left. Some require author’s first and last name spelt out, whereas others prefer initials. Some require only the first page number, whereas others require abbreviated ranges (501-7) and yet others full page ranges (501-507). Punctuation conventions vary so widely as to drive one crazy. One journal even requires that 75% of the references in an article need to be indexed by ISI and published after 1998. Some need the volume in bold or just italics, some require the year of publication following author names, and yet others want it later on. It goes on and on.
Having a uniform submission and data expression system not only saves time for authors and readers , but can also help to eliminate citation mistakes, unnecessary headaches and speed up the submission and publication process.
Biji T. Kurien, Yaser Dorri and R. Hal Scofield
Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, 825 NE 13th Street,
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73104, USA

Posted by Maxine Clarke on April 24, 2007
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Language clinic.
Aydin Orstan of the Snails' Tails blog was incensed to read this part of a sentence from an article in The Journal of Molluscan Studies: "...lived there for an extensive period, predating the pinninds' mantle." What the authors meant to convey, says Dr Orstan, was that the carnivorous Cymatium specimens recovered from inside the mantle cavities of several species of bivalves had been preying on the latters' mantle tissue. He also points out that in three subsequent sentences of the article, snails are stated to be "predating on" bivalves.
'Predate' is the verb meaning "to happen before". Hence, if one is writing about prey and predators, one needs to be clear about what is meant in English, by using a term such as "were preying on" as Dr Orstan suggests.
'Predator' and 'predation' are nouns that do not have a verb form in common English usage. A literal reading of the passage identified by Dr Orstan is that the snails lived before the bivalves.
A commenter at the Snails' Tails post writes that he uses the term "depredate", but I don't think this is necessary or desirable, or even correct in this context (to my knowledge and my dictionary's).

Posted by Maxine Clarke on April 24, 2007
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Increasing prose quality by decreasing word repetition : Article : Nature
Cheryl Strauss of the Department of Human Genetics, Emory University School of Medicine, writes:

'Increase' and 'decrease' are serviceable English words, so why is it my mission to winnow them from the prose that I edit daily? As a technical editor in a university department, I do not demand poetry from my writers; scientific accuracy and logical flow are paramount. Nevertheless, I long for an occasional fresh alternative to 'increasing' and 'decreasing' quantities, measurements and all manner of other too-familiar turns of phrase.
Must mice always have 'a decreased tail length'? I admire the professionalism that refrains from a description of 'adorable, stumpy little mouse tails', but what is wrong with 'shorter tails'? It saves two words for writers tearing their hair out over journals' word counts, and is no less precise. 'Fluoresce' is a lovely word, so why ruin its inherent lyricism with a dull 'increase'? Try 'brighter' fluorescence occasionally, or even 'more intense'.
I challenge all scientific authors: search your documents and count how often you use these two simple words, not forgetting permutations such as 'increasing' and 'increased'. You may be surprised at how frequently they rear their heads.
If so, I urge you to seek a remedy. There are times when only an increase or a decrease will do. Make those times count, and use the full expanse of the English language to broaden your prose elsewhere. Sheer repetition is anaesthetizing, and the aim (one hopes) is to keep the reader awake as well as informed. Strive for accuracy, logic and truth; but in matters of style, simple variety is a welcome spice.
From Nature 446, 725 (2007).

Posted by Maxine Clarke on April 18, 2007
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Professor Stephen Seligman writes:
Nature's News article on Darwin and the 20-year publication gap (Nature 446, 478-479; 2007) discusses some of the controversies surrounding the reasons for the 20-year delay between the time that Darwin began to think about evolution and the publication of Origin of Species.
Whatever the cause of the delay, there is little disagreement about the chief factor that forced Darwin eventually to publish (The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edn VII, 840-843; Cambridge University Press,1910). On 18 June 1858 he received a letter from A. R. Wallace, then at Ternate in the Maluku Islands, describing a theory of natural selection strikingly similar to his own. Darwin, taken aback by the realization that he could be scooped, consulted colleagues, who sent Wallace's essay, together with an abstract of Darwin's work, as a joint article that was read in a meeting of the Linnaean Society on 1 July of the same year.
Thus a procrastination of two decades was ended in 13 days. Both men had been stimulated by reading Malthus on population. While lying ill with fever in Maluku, Wallace developed the theory of natural selection in two hours and completed his essay in three days. By modern standards, both men would have been eligible to share a Nobel.

Stephen J. Seligman, MD
Research Professor
New York Medical College
Valhalla, New York 10595, USA

Posted by Maxine Clarke on April 16, 2007
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Nature and Nature journal authors, and indeed editors of the journals, have been in hot water with eagle-eyed readers in the past for publishing papers without proper definition of error bars. As a result, we produced a statistical checklist (including advice) for authors, as it became clear that there is widespread uncertainty about this statistical measure. Now, Cognitive Daily blog features an "error bar challenge". Accept if you dare.

For the faint-hearted, here is a link to the Cognitive Daily post containing the answers. If you are not sure of your confidence intervals and standard deviations, or would like a brush-up, the two Cognitive Daily posts are very useful.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on March 29, 2007
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Business writing clinic: Technical Writing in Ten Easy Steps

Kathy Lawrence, who runs the "Business Writing Clinic" blog, was clearing out old files when she came across a chapter she wrote for a book "Professional Communication and Information Design" (see link above for more details of the book). Her chapter, written with Ronald A. Brown, describes the technical editing process. Here's a short excerpt from the introduction:

We’ve all had work edited. Sometimes we almost dread the process, imagining that the editor is a fierce critic who is just itching to condemn you for sloppy work and inconsistencies. But this is far from true. In reality, the editor is your friend, who wants to work with you to improve your document, whether it’s paper or electronic. We look first at how you need to consider the document you are editing as a whole, and then focus on the nuts and bolts of the editing process.

The link at the top of this post will take you to the list of the "ten easy steps", which I think seems pretty useful, especially if you are writing your first commissioned article, such as a review.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on March 28, 2007
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From a distinguished correspondent, via e-mail:
While one could have long discussions about the exact meanings of words like bird, fish, insect, plant, tree, alga, cell, bacterium, prokaryote, flagellum, etc., I wonder whether they could not be better dealt with in a separate journal, leaving Nature to deal more with science.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on March 27, 2007
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How do you go about publishing your research in a Nature journal? What happens after you submit your paper? What is the editorial process? We have recently updated our advice to authors, which is available in newly translated French, German, Italian and Spanish versions. As ever, we welcome questions and comments about the editorial process and about getting published in our journals. Read all about it in:
English
French
German
Italian
Spanish
You can also visit our Asia-Pacific gateway for versions in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on March 14, 2007
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The Library Journal has just selected its best science books of 2006. Science's Big Picture—Best Sci-Tech Books 2006 - 3/1/2007 - Library Journal

"Of the 34 books selected as the best of 2006, three—Amir Aczel's The Artist and the Mathematician, Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map, and Chet Raymo's Walking Zero—draw both sobering and inspiring lessons for today from science's long history. And what's in store for the future of science? As Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe and Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers compellingly detail, global warming remains one of our most pressing concerns. At the same time, new theories in the physical and natural sciences, explored respectively by Charles Seife's Decoding the Universe and John Whitfield's In the Beat of a Heart, have great potential."

Congratulations to John Whitfield, who was a subeditor and then a news reporter for Nature before writing his book on the search for an underlying order in the biological world. David Robinson, reviewing the book in Nature, wrote:

"Whitfield does a fine job of describing the logic behind the theory and its antecedents. He unpacks its key assumptions and describes what the fractal plumbing system responsible for quarter-power scaling would look like. No armchair pundit, Whitfield interviewed the theory's authors and their colleagues, censused trees in Costa Rican forests with Enquist's team of students and postdocs, and spent a few less arduous hours having his own metabolism measured in London. His first-hand experiences at the subject's coalface are vividly readable. Whitfield's later chapters consider how metabolism relates to biodiversity and biogeography, and how it might dovetail with genetics. They also dwell on how these grand ideas might apply, or not, to the largest part of the tree of life: microbes. Overall, Whitfield's book provides the best available introduction to West, Brown and Enquist's big idea."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on March 13, 2007
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Pedro Beltrao, on his bioinformatics blog Public Rambling, has updated his blogroll into four categories, one of which is "publishing and general science". Nautilus and Peer to Peer feature in this category, with the comment "Nautilus and Peer-to-peer provide mostly useful information and a way to interact with Nature services". If you know of other useful science publishing-related blogs you can recommend, please let Pedro know at the link. Indeed, let us know here, too.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on March 08, 2007
Categories: Publications, Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

This month's (March) editorial in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology discusses a theme familar to readers of Nautilus: colour blindness. From the editorial: "In the right image, which simulates deuteranopia, red and green are indistinguishable (image processed at http://www.vischeck.com). This cover image (original, Erin Boyle; processed, B. Dougherty & A. Wade), which might have greeted a deuteranope picking up our June 2005 issue, raises the problem of how differential color perception affects the way that people view and indeed do science." NSMB has revised its format guidelines to ask authors not to use red/green contrasts in any diagrams, schematics or models; for primary data, authors are asked " to at least check the visibility of and, if they choose, automatically correct coloring using the VisCheck and Daltonize algorithms. " Further details, including the story of John Dalton in this regard, are in the NSMB editorial.
We hope authors of all our publications will adopt this advice, and as previously suggested by Joseph Ross, read the article by Okabe and Ito before preparing their colour figures.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on March 06, 2007
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Nature Cell Biology has this month been counting the average number of words in its own papers and in those in other comparable journals:

"Nature Cell Biology articles contain an average 9,006 words (7,903 in the main paper), with 11.5 figures (6.4 in the main paper) composed of 46.9 individual panels (26.8 in main paper). Compare this to The Journal of Cell Biology — 9,472 words average text length (9,248 in main paper), 10.1 figures (8.4 in the paper) with 31 panels (24.9 in the paper); or Cell — 11,042 words (10,188 in paper), 11.7 figures (6.7 in paper) with 48.3 panels (33.5 in paper). Importantly, Cell papers contain approximately the same amount of data as Nature Cell Biology articles, and The Journal of Cell Biology papers contain somewhat less. Cell papers contain 229 words per display panel, whereas Nature Cell Biology articles contain 192 and The Journal of Cell Biology papers are 5% longer than Nature Cell Biology articles. Of course, Nature Cell Biology letters are shorter (5,961 words and 8.0 figures, of which 4.7 are in the main paper, and 33.5 panels with 25 in the main paper), but articles represent approximately 30% of our papers, and we will not cut down a paper to letter format if this damages the contents."
(The data are based on ten randomly sampled recent papers from each journal. Text counts exclude figure legends.)
See here for full text of this Editorial.
Nature's new long methods sections were discussed on this blog last week.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on March 05, 2007
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There has been some discussion in Nature's Correspondence section about the difficulty experienced by colour blind readers in interpreting colour figures.
Chris Miall of the University of Birmingham, UK, started the topic in his letter pointing out that a significant number of readers cannot distinguish red from green. He cited issue 7120 of Nature, which, he says, contains six figures whose only two colours are red and green.
John Runions, of Oxford Brookes University, UK, then pointed out that magenta and yellow, a combination apparently encouraged by some journals, are not a good combination either. From his letter: "Magenta and yellow in overlay produce 'almost white' — virtually indistinguishable from the yellow in tiny images. Red and green, the standard colour pair, produce yellow when overlaid, and this is very easy to interpret. I suggest that journals continue to publish these images in red/green, but that they make alternatively coloured images available online as supplementary information for readers who have impaired colour vision."
Last week, Joseph Ross of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle drew attention to an excellent website. From his letter:
"As a red-green colour–blind (deuteranope) scientist and graphic designer, I have long campaigned for figures to be accessible to an entire audience. I do so, in part, by leading seminars training my colleagues to create accessible figures.
One of the key resources I employ in this crusade is a website by Masataka Okabe and Kei Ito: 'How to make figures and presentations that are friendly to color-blind people'.
I strongly urge all authors to visit this site, which both describes the need for creating accessible images (including simulations of colour-blindness for those who are curious) and, more importantly, provides instructions for making figures comprehensible to everyone. This includes instructions on how to pseudo-colour images containing red and green fluorescent signals — one of the most hated types of graphic among people with colour-blindness. Authors will find it is surprisingly easy to accommodate the colour-blind when creating figures.
Anyone who needs to be convinced that making scientific images more accessible is a worthwhile task should consider that colour-blindness is common, affecting 5–10% of males. If your next grant or manuscript submission contains colour figures, what if some of your reviewers are colour-blind? Will they be able to appreciate your figures? Considering the competition for funding and for publication, can you afford the possibility of frustrating your audience? The solution is at hand."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 16, 2007
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In his Nature Correspondence "Time to give due weight to the 'carbon footprint' issue", Geoffrey Hammond writes: "The media are increasingly using the term 'carbon footprint' in articles about the need to mitigate climate change by reducing our carbon dioxide emissions. Footprints are spatial indicators, measured in hectares or square metres. The property that is often referred to as a carbon footprint is actually a 'carbon weight' of kilograms or tonnes per person or activity.
To improve public understanding of the issues surrounding climate change, it is necessary to be precise. Other 'footprints', such as the ecological or environmental footprint, convert resource consumption and waste production into spatial units. The term 'ecological footprint' was coined by William E. Rees, a planner at the University of British Columbia — who had previously used the term 'appropriated carrying capacity' — after a computer delivery man told him that the new machine, which took up less space than his old model, had a 'smaller footprint'.
As well as the media, many government agencies and environmental groups now use the expression 'carbon footprint'. Those who favour precision in such matters should perhaps campaign for it to be called 'carbon weight', or some similar term. That would avoid lasting confusion. Losing weight might even take on a whole new meaning."
Nature 445, 256 (18 January 2007) | doi:10.1038/445256b; Published online 17 January 2007.
We welcome suggestions from readers.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 31, 2007
Categories: Quality measures, Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Question & Answer (Q&A) is a new format in Nature's popular News & Views section, the first outing being "Chromosome territories" by Karen J. Meaburn and Tom Misteli, published in the current (25 January 2007) issue (subscription or site licence required). Tim Lincoln, Nature's News and Views editor, provides some of his own questions and answers about this venture:

What is it? Q&As come in different guises in different publications, including Nature’s own News and News features sections. For News & Views, the Q&A approach involves a collaboration between an expert author and an editor in formulating questions and answers to illuminate some aspect of ‘happening’ science. It does not constitute an interview as such, and the expert author (or authors; two maximum) is the named source of the piece. Like everything in News & Views, Q&A pieces deal with science itself, not matters of policy, funding and so on.

Do these items require a news peg in the form of a new paper? No, which is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Q&A approach from the conventional type of News & Views article. The latter format will remain the mainstay of News & Views, but it restricts the topics we can cover, and the breadth in which we do so.

Isn’t the object of Q&A the same as that of the long News & Views features that appear from time to time? Yes it is, but there are various reasons for trying a different approach. One is that, unlike News & Views features, the appearance of Q&A items is very different to that of Reviews/Progress articles, emphasizing the intent to appeal to non-specialists. Another is that the Q&A format looks less intimidating not only in print but -- crucially -- also on the web, and will be more browsable in both media.

Will potential authors see the Q&A approach as trivializing their subject? Not if we can persuade them that this is a way to reach a very large audience -- one well beyond that which would tackle an article in more usual form. Although we want these pieces to be readable and lively, they won’t be frivolous. At about 2,000 words they’ll actually be pretty substantial. They just won’t look it.

What does one of these Q&A pieces look like? See for yourself via the article in the current issue on chromosome territories. It’s the fruit of collaboration between Karen Meaburn and Tom Misteli as the expert authors, and Helen Dell as the editor. More generally the rules are that these pieces should take around 2 or (maximum) 3 pages, with 2 or 3 display items (illustrations or tables). On the practical front, the Qs and As both need to vary in length to provide changes of pace (but with an absolute maximum of 110 characters for the Qs and of 180 words for the As). There’s no reference list as such; instead a maximum of six review articles/book chapters/websites are cited at the end.

How often will they appear? We’ll test the water by publishing a few in 2007. What follows will depend on how they are received by readers.

What kind of topics will be covered? Areas of science that are lively or that are seeing progress (not necessarily the same thing), or that are ripe for expansion. Put another way, Q&A pieces can answer the question of “What’s all this about?” in the mind of the general reader -- “this” being a topic that is coming to prominence or enjoying a revival. They will offer the opportunity to visit comparatively specialist areas. Whatever the topic, they should offer a balanced view, which is not to say they will be bland, or that authors won’t be encouraged to provide their own views about disputes and sticking-points as long as they are flagged as such.

Cell biology: Chromosome territories by Karen J. Meaburn and Tom Misteli. Nature 445, 379-781 (25 January 2007) | doi:10.1038/445379a; Published online 24 January 2007.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 30, 2007
Categories: Author services, Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

Q. Dear Nature Editorial Staff,

I run a research team, and for my sins, I also give lectures to undergraduates and graduates. One series of lectures that I give is entitled "Scientific Writing", the series being aimed at providing some general pointers regarding the layout of scientific papers and the style of scientific writing. The primary audience are PhD students and undergraduates doing lab projects.
On the question of the use of active versus passive voice, my advice to the students is to always use the active voice (where possible) since it is clearer and, most important, shorter. However, most of the students find it almost impossible to make a simple declarative statement along the lines of "I found that", preferring the passive "we found that", or more often, the neutral "it was found that".
I have always attributed this tendency towards the use of "we" or "it" in place of "I" down to a subconscious desire to avoid taking direct responsibility for a piece of research. Recently though, this malaise has spread to certain supervisors, who have taken to correcting dissertations written by undergraduates such that they are entirely written in the passive or neutral voice.
I wonder whether you might tell me the view of the Nature editors on the use of active and passive voices? I realize that you must receive relatively few single author manuscripts, but when you do, do you prefer the active voice? I'd be happy to be wrong in my own assumptions/asserttions about this (and will modify my lecture recommendations accordingly if required), but some up-to-date advice from the top journal would be appreciated.

A. Dear Dr Lecturer

Thanks for your interesting query. Yes, we agree with you that the active voice ("I" or "We" in the case of multi-author papers) is better and makes papers far clearer and more comprehesible, as described in our guidelines.
Unfortunately, many books and courses advise the opposite. An example is when one of my daughters was doing a practice science SATs test in primary school, in which a mark was given for saying that scientific papers/writing should be in the passive -- answering "active voice" did not get you the mark. What can one do under these entrenched, embedded circumstances?
Active voice has been Nature policy for as long as I can remember; it is enshrined in our style manual and is specifically recommended to all authors as part of our standard acceptance procedure. However, if an author insists on the passive, we would probably allow it, as at the end of the day it is the author's paper. We'd only make a rule ironclad if it affected the scientific content, I think. So you will see papers in Nature in the passive voice, but you can be assured that this is at the author's insistence rather than Nature policy.

best wishes
Maxine Clarke
NATURE
www.nature.com/authors

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 26, 2007
Categories: Author Services Feedback, Writing | Permalink | Comments (1)

The always stimulating Language Log blog features a post on hated words in titles. Current suggestions for a world ban are whither, revisited, status, role and (lower-case n) nature.

These words may crop up more frequently in the linguistics literature than they do as part of titles in the scientific literature. A favourite phrase that is usually edited out of titles on Nature journals is "Evidence for". "New" is an over-used word in titles, and indeed in the body of the paper. Any other pet hates that cause the reader's eyes hastily to move on to the next item in the table of contents?

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 19, 2007
Categories: Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

In commenting on the post "Web visibility", José J. Lunazzi writes: "The title of the article mentioning "speaking" english concerns in fact to a smaller but not small problem, that of "writing" english. It is good to read that people whose native language is english need to be conscious and willing in some way to reduce the problem for the whole science. A good and simple way is to learn esperanto and start communicating with the world through it. Seeing the broad spectrum the "delta" strictly selective function of english can be understood. I had beeing at Korea, China and Japan using esperanto and english, same as in USA, and am sure that esperanto performs much better in every field of activity, coloquial, domestic or in physics."

I replied along these lines: the Esperanto solution is sensible "on paper" but realistically it is unlikely to occur, given the length of time since Esperanto was devised as a universal language.

International science journals can provide help in various ways for authors whose first language is not English. The Nature journals provide advice before the author submits -- see our webpage on the author and referee site for this purpose. This page provides a link to similar useful advice at SciDev.Net.

We'd be happy to link to other examples of writing advice for scientists in our "writing a paper" guidelines -- whether research papers, review articles or other types of scientific or technical article. Please let us know if you are aware of good guidelines, and we'll link to it to help future authors maximize clarity in preparing their manuscripts.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 18, 2007
Categories: Author Services Feedback, Author services, Writing | Permalink | Comments (2)

Music of the Spheres: Converting Scientific Units

Bruce Irving, writing on his blog Music of the Spheres (link above) notes: "Orbiter is completely metric, so when I was writing yesterday's post about force vector visualization, I wanted to mention the conversion from meganewtons (MN) to pounds-force (lbf) for those more familiar with "English units" (i.e., pounds of thrust for rocket engines). There are probably a billion web sites with information on converting units, but I especially like AllConversions.com, because it has a simple format and includes a huge number of units in its drop-down lists."

Let us know your favourite, unit-conversion websites.

Allconversions.com can be accessed directly here.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 14, 2007
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