Archive by category | Authorship

NSMB’s tips for revising your paper in response to reviewers

NSMB's tips for revising your paper in response to reviewers

From: Nature Structural & Molecular Biology 17, 389 (2010) Your paper went out to review, and after anxious waiting, you receive the letter asking for a revised paper. However, those ever-demanding editors and reviewers want more. One of the most important elements of a revision is the point-by-point response. Here are some tips for making it more effective. Keep to the point. We [the NSMB editors] internally call this a point-by-point rather than a rebuttal, implying that it makes a series of points in response to each point raised by the reviewers. We will, and indeed have, read through 17-page  … Read more

How Nature selects papers for publication

How Nature selects papers for publication

This is a shortened version of an editorial in Nature ( 463, 850; 2010 ; free to read online). One myth that never seems to die is that Nature‘s editors seek to inflate the journal’s impact factor by sifting through submitted papers (some 16,000 last year) in search of those that promise a high citation rate. We don’t. Not only is it difficult to predict what a paper’s citation performance will be, but citations are an unreliable measure of importance. Take two papers in synthetic organic chemistry, both published in June 2006. One, ‘Control of four stereocentres in a triple  … Read more

Protein Data Bank policies for disputed structures

Helen M. Berman, director of the RCSB (Research Collabatory for Structural Bioinformatics) Protein Data Bank, and co-authors wrote a Correspondence to Nature ( 463, 425; 2010) to clarify the PDB’s correction procedures and policies in the light of a current investigation. Their letter is reproduced here.  Read more

Cite well, says Nature Chemical Biology

Cite well, says Nature Chemical Biology

Scientists need to devote more attention to the citation lists of scientific papers—the connectivity and usefulness of the scientific literature depend upon it. The February Editorial in Nature Chemical Biology ( 6, 79; 2009) explores how “citations of published work link together the concepts, technologies and advances that define scientific disciplines. Though information technology and databases have helped us to better manage the expanding scientific literature, the quality of our citation maps still hinges on the quality of the bibliographic information contained in each published paper. Because article citations are increasingly used as metrics of researcher productivity, the citation record  … Read more

Integrating with integrity, according to Nature Genetics

Integrating with integrity, according to Nature Genetics

Data worthy of integration with the results of other researchers need to be prepared to explicit export standards, linked to appropriate metadata and offered with field-specific caveats for use. The Editorial in the January edition of Nature Genetics ( 42, 1; 2010) explores the extent to which, to be useful at generating new analyses and hypotheses, data sharing needs to be about standardized formats as much as simply being made ‘available’. For example, the Editorial states, “Sample sizes, selection criteria, statistical significance, number of hypotheses tested, normalization and scaling procedures, read depth and sequence quality scores are all important considerations  … Read more

Scientific integrity in Iran

Scientific integrity in Iran

Nature continues to report on allegations of scientific plagiarism by Iranian authors. An Editorial in this week’s (10 December) issue calls for Iran’s institutions to investigate the allegations as a matter of urgency (Nature 462, 699; 2009, free to read online) in the light of fresh evidence that senior officials in the Iranian government have co-authored scientific papers that show signs of plagiarism (Nature 462, 704-705; 2009). This follows similar revelations in October (see Nature 461, 578–579; 2009). What follows is an extract of this week’s Editorial: The first wave of alleged plagiarism cases was widely discussed both inside and  … Read more

Nature Medicine’s wake-up call on intellectual property rights

Intellectual-property protection is a key driver of innovation, and researchers are always keen to file patents to shield their discoveries. Yet scientists often have an uninformed view of the value of their intellectual property. This naiveté slows down translational research. So concludes the November Editorial in Nature Medicine (15, 1229; 2009).  Read more

Polymath Project and Google Wave: open-source science

Two examples of open-source science are the subject of Opinion articles in this week’s Nature. In the first of these, Timothy Gowers and Michael Nielsen describe their ‘Polymath Project’, which showed that many minds can work together to solve difficult mathematical problems, and reflect on the lessons learned for open-source science (Nature 461, 879-881; 2009). In the other article, Cameron Neylon says that Google Wave is the kind of open-source online collaboration tool that should drive scientists to wire their research and publications into an interactive data web (Nature 461, 881; 2009).  Read more