publishing
Friday, September 14, 2019
A sin to conclude?
A recent Nature Physics editorial highlights the importance of writing a clear and accessible paper that has a ‘story’. Thus, anything that does not directly add to the story should be either left out, or placed elsewhere (eg, putting details of certain methods or supporting data in Supplementary Information).
They include a few random but useful tips such as avoid clichés, use adjectives judiciously, and do not use the word ‘very’.
To the list of words to avoid I would add:
‘novel’ (almost every paper is describing something new),
‘remarkable’ (a subjective word, often mistakenly used in place of ‘marked’), and
‘paradigm’ (see article by Goodman in BMJ)
The editorial also suggests that conclusions are not always necessary. Quoting an article by Jonathan Shewchuk entitled “Three sins of authors…”, they say that if the conclusions repeat what has been said elsewhere in the paper, they are not needed.
According to the editors at Nature Physics, following the standard rule for presenting an argument in English of “tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them” makes for a sloppy paper.
I do not agree. The key to writing a paper that convinces your readers lies in the way they will read and remember a paper.
The deluge of scientific papers means most readers develop an approach to reading articles that allows them to quickly assess whether they should read the whole thing. I will discuss this in a future post, but one of the first things I read is the conclusions of a paper to see if they justify reading the rest. It is a snapshot of the key findings and implications of the work, that I can read in 10 seconds.
Furthermore, a pithy conclusion distills your work into a single nugget of information that the reader is more likely to remember.
The conclusion should also give the key implications of your findings – what do they mean, where are they leading – in a single sentence. Thus, in two or three sentences your reader knows what you found, what it means and where it is going.
One note: avoid stating the obvious “more research is indicated” in the last sentence.
And finally, for a conclusion that quietly suggests the implications of the findings, it is hard to beat that of Watson and Crick’s 1953 Nature paper:
“It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”
Labels: journals, publishing, writing
Tuesday, April 17, 2019
The results above all else
At the 2019 EAU meeting in Berlin, Dr. Francesco Montorsi, the Editor-in-Chief of the journal European Urology, gave some good tips to aspiring authors.
Study design and rationale
He notes that “the design of the study is very often the key element leading to acceptance or rejection of the manuscript.” In clinical science, if you want to publish a paper that will impact your field of study, do a prospective study. As Montorsi notes: “prospective studies always generate data that are cleaner, more precise and more interesting than retrospective studies.”
Any paper should have a clear rationale for the study which is supported by good experimental design. These in turn are validated by the use of appropriate methods to address the study question. These three elements — rationale, experimental design, and methods — should be clearly communicated to the reader.
The results are everything
The heart of any paper is the results. These must be clearly and logically laid out for the reader. The results must be supported by a solid study design and appropriate methods. For this reason, I always recommend authors write the Results section first (Montorsi also suggests this).
Lay out your figures and tables in a logical order. Include a rationale for every experiment that fits within the overall study design. Explain the key findings. Describe the trends for the reader – don’t leave it to them to figure out (ie, do not say “the PFS in group A was 63% and in group B was 44%”, say “the PFS was higher in group A [63%] than group B [44%]”). Convince the reader that your results are valid (ie they are supported by a solid methodology) and that they are important.
Then you can go ahead and write the rest of the paper. Keep the introduction and discussion directly relevant to the results you obtained. Montorsi says that the Introduction section is the part of the paper which must capture the reviewers attention, but I do not agree. You can do this with the abstract.
Write the abstract last. Remember it the first thing someone will read (and all that most people will only ever read). Make the abstract clear and convincing to build anticipation in the reviewers mind that your study is interesting and worth publishing, and to eventually entice people to read the rest of the paper.
Labels: publishing, writing
Thursday, March 22, 2019
Jazz up your journal
Fancy advertisements reminding me that “time does not wait for anything or anyone” caught my eye at the Annual Meeting of the European Association of Urology in Berlin today. They were for the EAU journal, European Urology, which has been recently revamped from what I can see.
Of interest is that they have identified a few steps to improve the quality of the journal that should be considered by any publication wanting to boost its impact factor and keep its readers in an age of open access.
The first step is have a shiny cover.
In fact, the slick platinum cover is a smart way to make a journal easily identifiable. It also helps if your journal happens to have a big name: no one calls the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine by its name – it’s just the blue journal.
Dr. Francesco Montorsi, the current Editor-in-Chief of Eur Urol, identified 3 other steps to a better journal:
1. Accelerate the review process
Don’t leave manuscripts languishing on an editor’s desk for months only to be rejected. Eur Urol claims to have a turnaround time to the first editorial decision of 16 days. This is a lower limit said Dr. Montorsi because reviewers have to get 14 days to do a review. Which leads to the second point…
2. Give reviewers credit
It could be argued that many journals have made a lot of money off the backs of reviewers doing the hardest part of the job for free.
Eur Urol seems to take them a bit more seriously. They give a “reviewer of the month” award (that can go next to the Masters 50-m Breaststroke second place trophy in the cabinet).
More seriously, the entire editorial board is drawn from the most active reviewers – “no politics involved” – and is revised each year to include only the busiest reviewers.
3. Widen the readership
Looking beyond Europe, Dr. Montorsi suggested to the Japanese Urological Association that they arrange reciprocal online access to articles between Eur Urol and the International Journal of Urology.
A slick metallic cover doesn’t hurt either.
Labels: journals, publishing
Thursday, February 22, 2019
Writing guides online
The Science and Development Network website has a short guide to writing a scientific paper, with a basic outline of the process and a few tips. More interesting is their section on submitting a paper
which is written by Maxine Clark who is executive editor of Nature. She provides a good overview of the process of preparing and submitting a paper for publication, with some sound advice, such as:
“However careful and beautiful the presentation, a paper will not be published unless it has a clear, sound conclusion.”
Maxine also runs a blog for any author who aspires to publish in Nature.
Nature provides some good advice for authors writing a paper for a Nature journal. They repeatedly emphasise the need for clear, simple writing that catches the readers attention. For example:
“We encourage authors to “unpackage” concepts and to present their findings and conclusions in simply constructed sentences.”
They provide links to some writing resources, including the online guide that I have written. It is free, and one of the most comprehensive online. It is complemented by an email newsletter that expands on many of the important points and gives many practical examples.
Labels: publishing, writing
Thursday, February 1, 2019
Getting published
Competition to publish in the best journals is very tough. Science says “we are able to publish only a small fraction of the manuscripts we receive.” The Lancet rejects 90% of the 10,000 manuscripts submitted each year before peer review.
This becomes an even greater challenge for anyone whose first language is not English. Your manuscript can be rejected on the basis of poor English alone. But even native English speakers make common mistakes that make their papers confused and hard to read.
Clear language and logical explanations of results will catch the attention of readers and editors. This blog aims to help you make your manuscripts clearer and more likely to be accepted.
It is also very helpful to have a good understanding of the publishing process — how journals work, how editors think — if you want to maximise your chances of seeing your work in print. We will discuss this as well here.
Labels: publishing, writing