Nautilus

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 (1)

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
Categories: Communication, Conferences, Partners, Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

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
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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
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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
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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
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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)