This weekly Nautilus column highlights some of the online discussion at Nature Network in the preceding week that is of relevance to scientists as authors.
The Nature Network week column is archived here.
A senior scientist who already has a blog, Brian Derby, provides a vignette concerning publishing a paper. “Of the three referees, one is aginst us and does not believe that our mechanism can operate in both cases. Unfortunately he/she is a big shot with opinions that cannot be ignored (or so I was told by the editor). Because of this I spent all yesterday altering the paper so that we can publish our methodology in the appropriate journal. This is irritating because we will end up presenting the same stuff but have to finish it with the statement that goes something like – Although the accepted view is this, our evidence means that we might have to possibly consider the following, even though some people (i.e. the referee) might have thought otherwise. This is all very tedious but it is part of the publishing process.” I hope he finds his USB drive soon.
Martin Fenner interviews Victor Henning of Mendeley research networks: “if you install Mendeley Desktop on your computer, you can manage and share research papers on your machine, but you can also upload your papers to your private account on Mendeley Web to access them online. Mendeley Web anonymously aggregates the metadata of these papers to generate statistics about the most popular authors and papers in your research discipline, and – in the future – generates recommendations for papers which you might like.”
The relatively informal medium of blogging is well-suited to meeting reports (presenters and organizers permitting). For the reader, such meeting reports have an immediacy that is lacking in the more formal, published conference volumes; and for the scientist, meeting reports are a great way to hone authorship skills and reach new audiences. I was particularly struck by two examples from Nature Network this week from either end of the disciplinary spectrum, which show how a very wide ranging, or highly specialist, meeting can make an accessible, amusing and educational read. The first example is Sara Fletcher’s fascinating report: “When I joined Diamond Light Source three years ago as a technical writer, I was really excited about having access to such a major physics toy, having spent seven years as a research scientist and then writer for the National Physical Laboratory. It’s been quite a surprise to find myself a whole host of other disciplines, from structural biology, geochemistry, environmental science, and the burgeoning area of cultural heritage. So today sees my first live-blogging attempt, coming to you from the UK Synchrotron Users meeting. I’m currently listening to a seminar on Gothic Alterpieces, part of a Cultural Heritage session. The subheading for this session is “How Time Also Paints”, and looks at how certain paints and pigments can change with time, on both macro- and microscopic layers. This has been studied by using infrared spectroscopy to look at lead carboxylates, present in the egg tempera based paints commonly used on Gothic alterpieces.” Read on! Second, during the past week Bob O’Hara has been providing a daily series of posts reporting a workshop for ecologists on the distributions of butterflies in Europe, and how they will change in response to climate variations. The information “can be used for conservation planning: for endangered species: dynamic planning can even be tried, where habitat is created at times when it is needed by a species to survive, and not before when it would not be able to live on the site anyway, e.g. because it is too cold.” See here for Bob’s five (at time of writing this post) excellent reports of this focused workshop.
The Good Paper Journal Club discusses Liz Wager’s linguistic perspective on the week’s most (?) important science event, the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider: the use of qualifying adjectives in scientific papers, specifically about the subtle differences between big and large. The Journal Club is also discussing Linda Cooper’s article on the quality of scientific writing. Linda writes in the discussion: “I really do believe that it’s possible to write for specialist and non-specialist audiences. It’s much more difficult to do this of course, and most researchers aren’t sure how to even try. A good place to start is with close and careful revising which certainly helps to eliminate useless words and phrases. When writers get rid of the clutter, they have more space to explain complex concepts. As well, over and over again in my classes I find that graduate students need help identifying the real focus of their papers. Once they can do that, they also figure how to tell a logical story about their important findings. And more importantly, readers – both those familiar with the field and those outside it – can more easily understand what the author is trying to communicate.”