Nautilus

Creating a research highlight

Striking a balance between the need to allocate credit fairly and the need to be readable can be a challenge for editors and journalists when writing about research papers, according to this month’s (April) Editorial in Nature Nanotechnology (3, 179; 2008). Every week, editors at the Nature journals write 200-word articles about a research paper that explains the main results of the paper — why the work is interesting or important, how the results were obtained, what they mean for that area of research and beyond, and who did the work. Such articles appear every week as ‘research highlights’ at the website of each Nature journal. The Nature Nanotechnology Editorial discusses the challenges in writing these articles : what is interesting or important to one reader might be of little interest or import to another, for instance, and it may be impossible to say anything meaningful about the significance of the results, other than stating that they are indeed significant, in 200 or fewer words. Even awarding appropriate credit is hard in such limited space, as most papers have four or more authors, often from two or more institutions. The Editorial goes on to discuss some of the ways the journal deals with these problems, and contrasts research highlights with full scientific research papers.

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