Nautilus

Q. Hello,
I am looking for the "Instructions to Authors" and I do not find them. I take care about bibliographic management systems and I want to know which style the journal Nature prefers regarding text citation and the reference list.
Thank you
A Scientist.

A. Dear Dr Scientist
On every page of the journal Nature's website is a column on the left-hand side containing information -- one of these states "for authors and referees". Clicking on that takes you to the journal's author information index page.
The section on reference lists can be found here.
Best wishes
Maxine Clarke
NATURE

For authors wishing to submit to other Nature journals, each journal operates a similar system. Each journal is described briefly here, with a link to the home page and submission system of each.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on November 20, 2007
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Via Bronwen Dekker's charming Work Blog on Nature Network:

Q. What is the difference between Nature Methods and Nature Protocols?

A.This is a really good question! There are two important differences:
(1) Nature Methods publishes primary research, that is, methods that are new and have not been published before, while Nature Protocols publishes (hopefully) reliable methods that have already been used to generate results in primary research papers. Most of Nature Protocols’ content is commissioned.
(2) Nature Methods are formatted as a normal article, while in Nature Protocols, the procedure is written as a series of number steps in the active tense.

Protocol manuscripts are also structured slightly differently: The headings are Abstract, Introduction, Materials (Reagents, Equipment, Reagent Setup and Equipment Setup), Procedure, Timing, Troubleshooting, and Anticipated Results.
There are also cute little callouts. [See the Work Blog post for an example.]

I highly recommend subscribing to Work Blog for a window into a personal and always accessible mix of life as a "Protocols 2.0" pioneer.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on November 16, 2007
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There is a forum for Nature Precedings on Nature Network, where you can ask questions, receive answers and join the debate about this new way to post your results. (It is all free, but you need to sign up to Nature Network first.) One such question asked of Nature Precedings by a science blogger is: Why post on Precedings when one can just post on one’s blog? Hilary Spencer, product development manager for Nature Precedings, provides a reply at the Nature Network forum:

To me, there seem to be very good reasons to post on Precedings, the first of which involves stability. Blogs, and personal webpages, can be ephemeral. If the author changes affiliations, domain names, or even blog publishing software, blog postings may disappear. One of the goals of Precedings is to create a stable permanent archive for researchers. We anticipate that the content will be mirrored by one or more of our partner organizations, thus ensuring that the researcher’s work will always be available.
The second related reason involves ”citability”. Blogs citations currently fall in a gray area—there is no definitive way to cite a blog posting, although this is changing. One of the benefits of Precedings is that every document posted is citable, thus ensuring that the author can be properly credited with the idea. We assign a DOI or a handle to every submission, which provides a permanent identifier for the document and can be used in citations.
A final reason is exposure. For many researchers, posting to a central archive provides more exposure for their ideas than they would receive by posting it on their website. For example, I think authors tend to get more exposure when their documents are also listed in PubMed rather than only on their personal website. (Precedings allows researchers to link submissions to postings on their blogs for redundancy.) To that end, we hope Precedings will help researchers reach a wider audience for their ideas.
Nature has always been very supportive of the blogging community, but we feel that Precedings fills a gap between (informal) blogs and (formal) peer-reviewed publications. What are your thoughts?

Can you post on both Precedings and your blog? Go to the forum to give us your views and see our responses to questions like this, or add your comments here. Other topics being disussed at the Precedings Network forum are whether PowerPoint presentations are acceptable for Nature Precedings, the site's rating system, and what drives people to post preprints in a public website.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 26, 2007
Categories: Author Services Feedback, Policies Feedback, Publications | 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)

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)