Nature Structural & Molecular Biology (17, 139 ;2010) provides some writing advice for scientists: “less is more when it comes to writing a good scientific paper. Tell a story in clear, simple language and keep in mind the importance of the ‘big picture’.”

Editors and reviewers regularly have to slog through papers that seem to go on forever and, more dishearteningly, have the main points and interesting bits inexplicably hidden, when they assess them for possible publication. NSMB provides some pointers, a few of which are provided here:

Tell a story. We all love listening to a good story. And we all tell stories, but some are better at it than others, and those who tell the best stories are most able to get their points across. How you got your data is not that important—we don’t need a chronology (first we did this, then we did that, etc.). Instead, now that you have the data and have interpreted them a certain way, think about how best to tell a story in light of all the previous work in the field, the question(s) you are addressing and why that question is important. How do your results advance our understanding of the question(s)? Have you discovered something new or unexpected? Consider how your findings fit into the broader context of the field, whether they are likely to change the way people in the field will think about the topic and how they will drive further experiments in the future.

Be clear. Making your story clear is not the same thing as dumbing it down. No reviewer has ever said that a paper was too easy to read. We do, however, get complaints from reviewers about how complicated, convoluted or downright confusing a paper is. Clear, simple language allows the data and their interpretation to come through. Remember that clarity is especially important when you are trying to get complicated ideas across. Keep the jargon to a minimum and explain the terms you do use. When you’re done, give your paper to a scientist outside your field and ask that person to read it for clarity. He or she will be able to point out all the remaining jargon, whether the experimental design, results and data interpretation are clear and how interesting your paper is to someone working in another area.

Provide an informative title and abstract. PubMed allows one to search through ~19 million citations, and Table of Contents e-alerts bring you the latest from your favorite journals. And what do you see when your e-alert arrives or your search is complete?—the title and abstract. Most people will stop there without reading any further, so don’t blow it with a boring title. Make the abstract clear and try to get the ‘big picture’ across. Do not get bogged down in details. As an author, this is also your chance to draw your readers in, to entice them to read on. If the title and abstract are comprehensible to only a handful of people directly in your field, you have greatly narrowed the potential readership of your paper.

NSMB journal website.

Nature journals’ advice on how to write a scientific paper, which provides links to several independent resources.

How to get published in a Nature journal.

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.”

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.