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Author Services Feedback

Levels of editing at Nature

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Q: Is editing support given to manuscripts published in Nature? What level of editing is done? Is this editing done in house or outsourced? Are you and the authors pleased with the level of editing?

A: When a manuscript is submitted to Nature it goes through several rounds of peer review – the manuscript as accepted is very different from the version submitted. The peer-reviewers (typically 2 or 3) and the editors provide substantial structural (developmental) editing suggestions. All manuscripts accepted in principle for publication go through a detailed checklist procedure to guide the author both in matters of clarity and in important points such as financial interest declarations, supplementary information, and so on.

After acceptance, we use a combination of automatic editing tools for routine structuring (eg ordering and styling reference lists) but have a dedicated team of sub (copy) editors who edit the manuscript in Word, sending the author an edited version of the ms with changes tracked. The subeditor also manages the artwork process (all figures are relettered and sized by a dedicated art department), and the proofing-out process in which the author is sent a PDF to sign off. We officially don’t accept “new” changes on proof but in practice we do if they are reasonable. The subeditors also manage any post-publication correction process, in consultation with the manuscript editors.

The only part of this editorial process that is done externally is the typesetting. The rest of it is done in-house, with an increasing number of technical tools such as tracking systems.

Nature also has review, opinion and comment sections as well as a comprehensive weekly and daily news service. These are all produced in-house: editing, graphics, art, layout. All of our web production and processes are done in-house, some parts of the process are managed by our team in Bangalore but all of our standard web production and development is done in-house.

Nature authors are pleased at the level of editing help they receive – we regularly conduct author experience surveys, and are currently doing market research among groups of readers. As a senior editor at Nature I am very happy with the subediting process we run here – having the team in-house is extremely flexible for adding in web functionality, metadata and developing new templates and other projects, as well as the more traditional editing tasks.

The editorial process at Nature.

Getting published in a Nature journal.

Advice on writing a paper for a Nature journal.

Difference between Nature Articles and Letters

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Q. I plan to submit a research article to Nature, but I am not sure what is difference between Nature article and letter. I notice there is usually only one article per issue of Nature, but several letters. I do not know how to decide to submit a manuscript as an article format or as a letter format. Would you please explain this to me?

A. Articles are original reports whose conclusions represent a substantial advance in understanding of an important problem and have immediate, far-reaching implications.

Letters are short reports of original research focused on an outstanding finding whose importance means that it will be of interest to scientists in other fields.

More details are available at the journal’s guide to authors and at the Nature Publishing Group author and reviewers’ website, where there is a description of the article types published in all the Nature journals.

Presubmission enquiry or entire manuscript?

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Q: Dear Nature: I am considering sending a presubmission enquiry for a Letter, and in the process, noticed your comment that, “The editors would prefer to read the full paper even if it isn’t in journal format, than to read a presub.” If, (hypothetically!) I had a paper written in the format of another journal which that journal has not offered to publish, is there a mechanism by which I could submit this paper, rather than a presubmission enquiry, to Nature with the understanding that it would be rewritten to conform to your format if it were to be formally submitted? Would this be preferable? It would certainly be easier for me, and presumably would give you better information.

A: Thank you for your message. Yes, you can submit a paper to Nature in the same format that you’ve used for another journal. We aren’t too concerned about the precise details of format at the submission stage as long as the manuscript is not excessively over-length. As you say, a full manuscript that isn’t quite in the journal format is more informative for the editors than a brief presubmission enquiry.

All manuscripts that are sent for peer-review go through at least two rounds of revision, so there is opportunity at the first revision stage for format issues to be addressed. The editor will send specific guidelines then.

We recommend to authors who wish to submit a manuscript that has previously been formatted for another journal that that they note in their covering letter that their manuscript is currently not in Nature‘s precise format as specified in our guidelines, and that they are willing to revise the manuscript to Nature’s format during the peer-review process.

How to find the instructions to authors

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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 “”https://www.nature.com/nature/authors/index.html">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.

Nature Protocols and Nature Methods

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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.

Precedings forum on Nature Network

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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.

Active is better than passive or neutral

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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

Writing advice for non-native-English speakers

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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.