Nature Cell Biology has this month been counting the average number of words in its own papers and in those in other comparable journals:

“Nature Cell Biology articles contain an average 9,006 words (7,903 in the main paper), with 11.5 figures (6.4 in the main paper) composed of 46.9 individual panels (26.8 in main paper). Compare this to The Journal of Cell Biology — 9,472 words average text length (9,248 in main paper), 10.1 figures (8.4 in the paper) with 31 panels (24.9 in the paper); or Cell — 11,042 words (10,188 in paper), 11.7 figures (6.7 in paper) with 48.3 panels (33.5 in paper). Importantly, Cell papers contain approximately the same amount of data as Nature Cell Biology articles, and The Journal of Cell Biology papers contain somewhat less. Cell papers contain 229 words per display panel, whereas Nature Cell Biology articles contain 192 and The Journal of Cell Biology papers are 5% longer than Nature Cell Biology articles. Of course, Nature Cell Biology letters are shorter (5,961 words and 8.0 figures, of which 4.7 are in the main paper, and 33.5 panels with 25 in the main paper), but articles represent approximately 30% of our papers, and we will not cut down a paper to letter format if this damages the contents.”

(The data are based on ten randomly sampled recent papers from each journal. Text counts exclude figure legends.)

See here for full text of this Editorial.

Nature’s new long methods sections were discussed on this blog last week.