Kyle’s blog entry on writing scientific papers got me thinking about an important – and underappreciated – part of submitting your work to a journal. So I thought I’d write down a few of my thoughts about cover letters. A caveat, of course, is that these are just my opinions – maybe other NPG editors can chime in and let me know if they agree/disagree with the items on this list…

1. You don’t need to discuss much, but always submit a cover letter (unless the journal doesn’t allow it) – I obviously can’t speak for editors at other journals, but I always read the cover letter. It’s often the first thing an editor reads, so don’t miss out on a chance to make a good impression.

2. You don’t need to be coy, Roy – the cover letter should contain a brief summary of the work, but be careful not to over- or underplay the discovery. If there are other key papers that have been recently published (i.e., this work refutes the model proposed in that paper), then point them out in the cover letter too – this part of the letter can be used to put your work into a broader context and highlight certain aspects that were unexpected/surprising.

3. Eschew obfuscation, espouse elucidation – it’s fine to assume the reader is a Ph.D.-level scientist, but I think it’s worth remembering that they may not be intimately familiar with every detail of your particular system. For this reason, I think it’s worth taking the time to highlight the main points/the major implications of the work (see #2, though) without getting too bogged down in the technical details. If it’s the first time anyone’s shown X, then that’s worth highlighting – just don’t forget to explain why X is so important…

4. Eats, Shoots & Leaves – Microsoft Word’s spell-check can be very helpful, but I think it’s worth asking someone outside of your immediate field to read through your cover letter (and paper) to see if they notice any spelling/grammatical errors or confusing sentences/paragraphs. (But don’t get too worried – you don’t need to buy a Chicago Manual of Style to write a good cover letter…)

5. If you’ve talked with an editor about the work (at a meeting, for example), definitely mention this in your cover letter. This is less important if the team of editors is fairly small (but I think it’s still worth doing) – at Nature, there’s a fairly large editorial team and your paper may not be assigned to the person you talked with (this is especially true for multidisciplinary work). Though we circulate new submissions to editors who handle papers in related areas, it’s always good to know if you’ve talked with someone else on the team, as this will ensure that they see the paper before any editorial decision is made.

6. Always suggest referees – most journals let you list a few potential referees that you feel are particularly qualified to review the work. But don’t put down your old Ph.D./post-doc advisor or someone who you’ve recently published with (as many editors check PubMed or other databases before contacting referees) – even if there is no actual conflict of interest, many editors avoid a situation where there could be a perceived conflict of interest. These lists tend to be useful starting places when contacting referees (especially if there is a special technique involved or if the paper involves a discovery in a relatively small field).

7. Nature allows authors to submit a short list (usually two or three names) of people working on related work (or people who the authors feel may not be able to act as an impartial referee). This is very useful information, as (unfortunately) competition and bias exist, and it’s best to know this before we start contacting referees. But please keep the list short – I’ve seen entire departments or schools listed in this section – or you may get an email from the editor asking you to revise your list.

Hmm – I think that’s it. I guess I’m a few shy of 50 – any other NPG editors want to add their thoughts?

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Senior Editor, Nature)

I was chatting with a pregnant co-worker yesterday about how many old wives’ tales there are about ‘predicting’ the sex of a pregnant woman’s fetus. For example, she mentioned that there’s an old wives’ tale in Greece that says that if you have a turtle in the house, and the turtle grows faster from neck-to-tail than from side-to-side, it’s a girl. Otherwise, it’s a boy. (Or maybe it’s the other way around?)

I was thinking about this last night and realized that – though I’m generally quite skeptical and I don’t believe in old wives’ tales – I was fairly superstitious back in graduate school. I’m the proud owner of a ‘lucky’ calculator that came to almost every exam I’ve taken since 9th grade. And there were certain t-shirts I wore to lab on ‘important’ days (maybe when running a reaction for the first time or when I was performing a key biochemical/cellular assay…) I wasn’t alone in this regard: other people in the lab had ‘lucky’ pens or certain rituals they performed before doing an important experiment…

How about you? Any superstitions or rituals that you do (or did) in the lab that don’t make any scientific sense? Do you ever have trouble reconciling your scientific/logical side with the superstitious side?

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Senior Editor, Nature)

I was just talking with Catherine, and we can’t remember if “a week in the library will save you a day in the lab” or if “a week in the lab will save you a day in the library”? I guess if you’re starting a new project, maybe it’s best to set up a whole bunch of experiments to see what works (steering clear of the dogma you’d find in published papers). But if you’re nearing the end of a total synthesis, you probably want to play it safe with your milligram/sub-milligram quantities of your natural product and spend a bit more time in the library trouble-shooting problems…

What about other quotable quotes? Was RB Woodward right (“A scientist has to work very hard to get to the point where he can be lucky.”) or was Ralph Waldo Emerson right (“Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.”)? (The Google fight results are closer than you’d think…) Is time on your side or does time pass more quickly as your Ph.D./post-doc progresses?

What do you think/what’s your scientific philosophy? Does it match up with the prevailing philosophy of your lab? What other quotes (or song lyrics) come to mind when you think about the last six months of your scientific research?

Unfortunately, we aren’t able to set up a poll on the blog, so we’ll have to do it the old fashion way – please leave us a comment with your thoughts…

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Senior Editor, Nature)

I must admit, I really enjoy riding the bus to work – it’s not just because of the unusual people you tend to meet on public transportation (though that’s half the fun), but because the rides are long enough for me to skim through various journals to see if there’s anything I want to read later on in the day. Normally there are a few things that catch my eye, and I’ll set them aside for a lunch break (or while I’m waiting for the bus at the end of the day). But my plan to quickly skim through this week’s Science failed completely – it’s jam-packed full of interesting articles, and I needed to set aside a few hours to read through them all.

It’s a special issue focused on ‘Sustainability and Energy,’ two topics that are obviously important these days – it starts out with a few ‘Profiles’ of major players in the field (I especially enjoyed reading the ones on Dan Nocera, Jay Keasling, and James Dumesic) and then there’s a number of ‘Perspectives’ (I’d recommend starting with the ones by Whitesides & Crabtree and Stephanopoulos).

Reading through this material made me feel like (somewhere along the way) I should have had a class or two that focused on the chemistry/biochemistry of energy research. Before I started working at Nature, I hadn’t really been exposed to this topic in much detail, despite taking (what felt like) dozens of classes in my undergraduate days. Those classes tended to focus on ‘pure’ chemistry/shy away from applications, and the graduate classes I took were fairly specialized/on completely different topics…

One of my undergraduate physical chemistry classes had both chemists and civil engineers in it, and I remember that the questions asked by the civil engineers (“Is this why cement dries on the outside first?”) generally annoyed the chemists – is this a clash of the two cultures (i.e., science vs. engineering), or were my experiences the exception and not the rule?

Do you think we are doing enough to make sure that future generations of chemists are prepared to tackle important problems in energy research? Sure – you could argue that applied chemistry is the domain of the chemical engineers and that chemists shouldn’t learn this sort of stuff at the undergraduate level. But shouldn’t we be doing more to expose undergraduate chemists to important topics involving applied chemical research (for example, by requiring chemistry majors to take a chemical engineering class or two)?

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Senior Editor, Nature)

Looking for something to read while you’re waiting for the rotovap to free up or the PAGE gel to finish running? You might want to take a look at yesterday’s issue of Nature, which has a number of chemistry/chemical papers. In addition to the paper by Serreli et al. that Katharine and Stuart mentioned, there’s a News & Views piece from Steven Nolan on Craig Forsyth’s recent ACIE paper and a paper from Stern et al. that describes miniature, ultra-sensitive sensors that can detect unlabeled antibodies at concentrations below 100 femtomolar (and can monitor the cellular immune response in ‘real-time’).

There’s also a cool paper involving the TRPA1 channel – TRP channels respond to “”https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v426/n6966/abs/nature02196.html">temperature, touch, pain, osmolarity, pheromones, taste, and other stimuli," and the TRPA1 channel specifically responds to a range of structurally-diverse compounds, including mustard oil, acrolein, and icilin.

In Macpherson et al., the authors used ‘click chemistry’ to show that derivatives of mustard oil and cinnamaldehyde covalently bound to the TRPA1 channel. They used mass spectrometry to identify fourteen TRPA1 cysteine residues that reacted with iodoacetamide, three of which were required for normal channel function. From a chemical standpoint, this might not seem all that surprising, but this is apparently the first ion channel known to be activated by this mechanism, and I think it’s interesting to see how “tuning TRPA1 to respond to covalent modification by reactive compounds … [enables the nervous system to] directly assess the noxious environment of sensory neurons.” For those of you teaching biological/bio-organic chemistry courses, this might make a good test question – it’s a nice ‘real world’ example of how understanding basic organic chemistry can be used to explore how an enzyme works…

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Senior Editor, Nature)

I saw an amazing BBC documentary a few years ago called “Bad Medicine” – the documentary focused on Dora Akunyili, the Director General of Nigeria’s National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), and her efforts to eradicate fake pharmaceuticals/counterfeit drugs in Nigeria.

Before Akunyili took over her post in 2001, a staggering 80% of the medications sold there were deficient in one way or another. Some contained less of the active ingredient than was specified on the label. Others were past their expiration date. Some were filled with inert lactose or powdered chalk.

The stories she told were astonishing: after cracking down on the counterfeiters, they “”https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/this_world/4656627.stm">fought back … [burning] down Nafdac’s offices and threaten[ing] to kill her and her children"; “”https://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1124289,00.html">snipers opened fire on her car … [and] a bullet pierced through [her] head scarf and grazed [her] scalp“; when the ”https://www.babyhearts.com/new/default.php?m=1">International Children’s Heart Foundation visited Nigeria to perform heart surgery on children, four died because someone had replaced the adrenaline with water. It was a heart-wrenching documentary about how far some people will go to make money, and how hard it is to stop them: the World Health Organization “”https://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3261385.stm">estimates up to 25% of medicines consumed in developing nations are counterfeit or substandard" and this problem isn’t restricted to countries in the developing world.

So I was excited to read a recent news@nature.com story by Katharine Sanderson about a paper that just came out on Analytical Chemistry’s ASAP. The authors used spatially offset Raman spectroscopy (SORS) to examine ibuprofen and paracetamol (acetaminophen), without removing them from their blister packs/bottles – the hope is that existing handheld Raman spectrometers could be turned into portable SORS detectors and that these devices could be used by people like Dora Akunyili to quickly determine whether or not a drug is counterfeit…

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Senior Editor, Nature)