Editage Blog
Science Research Writing [1] is a book from the trenches: the author has been teaching English for academic purposes to science students for over 30 years, the past 15 years as part of the English Language Support Programme at Imperial College, London, where the author works closely with individual research students and staff who are writing a paper or a thesis.
What distinguishes this guide from others is its reassuring stance: ‘You may feel that you don’t have the time to improve your English, but you already know most of what you need from the reading you have done over the years. In order to write up your research for publication you don’t need to learn much more English than you already know. Science writing is much easier than it looks’ [emphasis in original]. The author then adds: ‘Because science writing is so conventional, the amount of grammar and vocabulary you need to learn is quite small.’
The strategy the author suggests is practical and straightforward: ‘carefully examine good examples of the kind of writing you would like to produce, identify and master the structure, grammar and vocabulary you see in these examples and then apply them in your own writing.’ Accordingly, the book is divided into five parts, which correspond to the IMRaD structure [2], with one part devoted to the title and the abstract, the other parts being Introduction, Methodology, Results, and Discussion or Conclusion. Each unit begins with a description of how each section or part is structured, followed by a sample of the part being discussed. The relevant points of grammar are discussed in detail, and readers are given a chance to practise what they have learnt by means of some exercises. Full-length sections (introduction, methodology, etc.) from real research articles come next. Finally, readers are invited to try their hand at writing the relevant section of a fictitious paper based on the background information provided. For instances, readers are asked to write an introduction based on the following briefing: ‘Imagine that you have just completed a research project to design a bicycle cover which can protect the cyclist from injury, pollution, or just from rain. Perhaps you provided a computer simulation of its use, or modelled the ventilation system. Perhaps you were involved in the aerodynamics, or the polymer construction of the material for the cover — or any other aspect of the project.’ A model answer is then provided, so that students can compare their version with the one offered by the author.
All in all, Science Research Writing is a thoroughly practical book: readers are taken by hand as it were and guided carefully all along the way.
[1] Glasman-Deal H. 2010. Science Research Writing for Non-native Speakers of English. London: Imperial College Press. 257 pp.
[2] http://blog.editage.com/writing-a-paper-in-the-IMRaD-structure-part-1
["Publish and prosper" is a series of posts about tips for researchers whose first language is not English but who submit papers to journals published in English. The series touches upon not only writing (spelling, grammar, punctuation, usage, and style) but everything else relevant to publishing research papers that journal editors wish their authors knew.]
At Editage, our aim is to always deliver the best service to you, the author. We have on board a talented editorial staff to help you get your paper in shape. But they face one major limitation—they work remotely. The scope for two-way communication is limited, which sometimes hinders our ability to take the right decisions on your manuscript.
To some extent, editors can overcome this limitation through notes. However, to get the best out of us, there are several things that you, as the author, can also do. Read on to see how.
Anything you’d like us to know before we begin?
Be it a terminology issue you are unsure of or a matter of correctly conveying your meaning, do point it out to us at the outset. This could preempt any potential ambiguities and allow the editor to move straight to offering you solutions, rendering the editing process much smoother. Here’s another scenario: you may have a word count limit for the abstract, but you may not wish to have the manuscript formatted as per the guidelines of your intended journal. In this case, you can simply specify the word count limit for the abstract and the editor will make sure to not exceed the limit, which will make your pre-submission work easier.
Given us the essentials? Now tell us more.
Every bit of information you give us can go a long way in ensuring a fantastic edit. The journal name and URL is certainly useful information, but telling us which contribution type you intend to go in for, for instance, will help us be more thorough.
You can give us such information in the “Job Instructions” field on the Editage Online System (EOS) while uploading files for a new editing assignment. Alternatively, you can type out this information in a separate “reference” file and upload it along with the files to be edited.
Engage in a dialogue with your editor
While working on the assignment, your editor will use the comments feature in MS Word and the Letter from the Editor to tell you about confusing text, provide suggestions, and seek clarifications in case sufficient information is not available.
Nevertheless, there might be instances where you feel the edit isn’t quite what you intended or perhaps that certain technical conventions haven’t been observed. Consider letting your editor know through the free Client Questions service. S/he might have a perfectly reasonable explanation, and if you agree with it, you can retain the edit. Else, the editor can make adjustments according to the clarifications you provide.
More than anything, this exchange will help the editor learn from you, making him/her better equipped to work on your future assignments.
Who doesn’t like feedback?
We’d love to hear what you thought about the edit. We take great pride in replicating a job well done, and telling us what you liked about our service will help us do just that. Moreover, we will be able to apply this learning in your future assignments.
That said, we realize that time is of essence, so to speed up your feedback effort, we’ve introduced the nifty Like/Dislike feature on the EOS. With just a click of a button, your preferences will get logged into our delivery system, and we will be able to assign the most suitable editor for your future assignments.
It's a process
As editors, we view our association with you not merely as a transaction, but as a collaboration. We realize that a single round of editing may not yield a publication-ready manuscript. To be able to support you beyond a single iteration, we offer the Multiple-Round Editing service (free of charge with the Premium Editing Service). Go in for one of these, and allow us to see your paper through to a submission-ready stage.
Be cautioned, though, that this will be a time-intensive process, so remember to factor in sufficient time for manuscript editing. Considering the rewards, it’s bound to help you get the best out of the effort you have put into your research!
What sets the book A Scientific Approach to Scientific Writing [1] apart from other similar books is the wealth of examples it provides: the book is studded with examples including a few that can qualify as case studies and are labelled as such – Hypothetical case studies 1 to 4 – by the authors. The book’s second distinguishing, and refreshing, feature is its humour: the authors state upfront that the most effective way of all to maximize the chances of publication is to buy the company that owns the target journal, second only to blackmailing the journal’s editor!
But the humour is used only to leaven solid, practical advice, starting from ‘essential steps before writing a paper’ (Chapter 2) and ending with how to deal with outright rejection. The authors mention in Chapter 1 that they ‘have written, re-written or edited more than 4,000 texts of diverse kinds and [...] have substantial experience of both writing papers and the problems encountered by people who are learning to write them, in either their first or other languages.’ It is this wealth of experience that enables the authors to show – and not just tell – how to write and, more important, to improve what has been written.
Although the examples are largely biological or ecological, they will help researchers in other fields also because the authors deliberately opted for such examples ‘partly because biological and ecological examples are easier to understand for scientists generally’.
A Scientific Approach to Scientific Writing is a book that will prove immensely useful as well as entertaining to readers of this blog.
[1] Blackwell J and Martin J. 2011. A Scientific Approach to Scientific Writing. New York: Springer. 112 pp.
["Publish and prosper" is a series of posts about tips for researchers whose first language is not English but who submit papers to journals published in English. The series touches upon not only writing (spelling, grammar, punctuation, usage, and style) but everything else relevant to publishing research papers that journal editors wish their authors knew.]
We all know that reading extensively makes you a better writer, but the contribution of listening to learning a language is often unappreciated. Perhaps ‘mother tongue’ or ‘first language’ is better defined as the language that one learns almost exclusively through listening. Since this series of blog posts is meant mainly for those whose first language is not English, this post brings to your attention some sources of spoken English so that you can become more proficient by listening to good English. In particular, it will help with the kind of English you need to write on scientific and technical topics.
Advances in information technology now make it easy to listen to good English from a variety of sources besides those traditionally used for the purpose, such as broadcasts from the BBC or the Voice of America. Portable devices that can play mp3 files are all too common now, and so are ‘podcasts’, which are, typically, short talks on a single topic available for downloading from websites. ‘Sixty second science’ [1], for example, is a series of podcasts from the publishers of Scientific American. Also, Nature, the prestigious weekly science journal from Britain, offers podcasts based on latest research published in that journal [2]; and the US National Academies Press offers 10-minute podcasts on a variety of scientific topics [3], making available to listeners the combined resources of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council.
One more advantage of listening over reading is that the skill proves particularly helpful while participating in scientific conferences and similar events where you encounter spoken English. Happy listening!
[1] www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/podcasts.cfm?type=60-second-science
[2] www.nature.com/nature/podcast/index.html
[3] http://media.nap.edu/podcasts/
["Publish and prosper" is a series of posts about tips for researchers whose first language is not English but who submit papers to journals published in English. The series touches upon not only writing (spelling, grammar, punctuation, usage, and style) but everything else relevant to publishing research papers that journal editors wish their authors knew.]
Stock phrases such as ‘hook, line, and sinker’, ‘lock, stock, and barrel’, ‘bits and pieces’, and ‘odds and ends’ contain words that always go together and are in the same order. Such words that are used together are called collocations. This post, however, deals with a pair of words that does not make a stock phrase but these words always occur together and have one or more words between them. These words are ‘between’ and ‘and’. ‘Between’ always leads, and not pairing it with ‘and’ constitutes a common error.
The rule is simple: every ‘between’ must always be matched with ‘and’—no other word will do, least of all its unsuccessful suitor ‘to’. Thus, you can write ‘The experiment was carried out at many sites, all of them between 600 m and 1000 m above the mean sea level.’ You may choose to write ‘from 600 m to 1000 m’ or ‘600–1000 m’, but to write ‘between 600 m to 1000 m’ is definitely wrong—and constitutes one of the most common grammatical errors.
Burchfield, in Fowler’s Modern English Usage [1] has this to say under the heading ‘between + and’: “The natural conjunction linking elements introduced by between is and . . . or, as opposed to, (as) against, etc., are occasionally encountered and are always regrettable.”
[1] Burchfield R W (ed.). 1996. The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage, 3rd edn, p. 107. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 864 pp.
["Publish and prosper" is a series of posts about tips for researchers whose first language is not English but who submit papers to journals published in English. The series touches upon not only writing (spelling, grammar, punctuation, usage, and style) but everything else relevant to publishing research papers that journal editors wish their authors knew.]
An earlier post in this series [1] discussed many trivial details related to numbered citations in text, such as whether the number should be enclosed within square brackets or round brackets and whether it should be a superscript or ‘in line’. This post examines in detail the conventions related to punctuation when sources are cited not by numbers but by names of authors together with the year of publication. This system is also known as the Harvard system. The citations may be textual, as in ‘Tanaka (2010) showed that excess of boron is toxic to wheat’, or parenthetical, as in ‘boron in excess is toxic to wheat (Tanaka 2010)’.
In the second example above, only a space separates the name of the author from the year of publication. Some journals use a comma instead of a space between the name and the year. However, when a statement is supported by multiple citations, additional punctuation is necessary to separate one citation from the next, as in ‘Several studies have shown that boron, when applied in excess, is toxic to wheat (Tanaka 2010, Ustinov 2009, Varghese 2011, Westfield 2000)’. A comma can separate one citation from the next in this case because no comma appears within any citation whereas a semicolon, as a stronger comma or a supercomma, becomes necessary to separate one citation from the next when each citation already contains a comma, as in ‘(Tanaka, 2010; Ustinov, 2009; Varghese, 2011; Westfield 2000)’.
Even with single citations that contain several authors, the same convention works because the year marks the end of each citation, as in ‘Ashcroft, Jones, and Shipley 2010, Bansal and Kumar 2009, Ishiyama, Yadav, and Gustafson 2012’. Authors should examine the way their target journal handles citations because some journals – even when they do not use a comma between the name/s and the year – use the semicolon to separate one citation from the next, as in ‘Tanaka 2010; Ustinov 2009; Varghese 2011; Westfield 2000’.
You should also note whether such multiple citations are arranged alphabetically (as in these examples) or chronologically, in which case the last example will read ‘Westfield 2000; Ustinov 2009; ‘Tanaka 2010; Varghese 2011’. The use of "and" or ampersand (&) also needs to be noted, but perhaps that is the stuff for another post.
[1] http://blog.editage.com/numbered-citations-in-text-some-matters-of-detail#.UP-eHWH4L4I
["Publish and prosper" is a series of posts about tips for researchers whose first language is not English but who submit papers to journals published in English. The series touches upon not only writing (spelling, grammar, punctuation, usage, and style) but everything else relevant to publishing research papers that journal editors wish their authors knew.]
An earlier post in this series [1] mentioned a few conventions about inserting spaces in quantitative expressions – such as the space between a value and its unit, as in 25 kg – and also about not inserting spaces in a few cases, such as in percentages (20% and not 20 %) and geographic coordinates.
A space is also required on either side of mathematical operators [2] such as the plus sign, the multiplication sign, and the minus sign (as in ‘2 + 3 = 5’, ‘2 × 3 = 6’, and ‘3 – 2 = 1’). The plus-or-minus sign (±) also requires a space on either side. However, when no mathematical operation is involved, the space is not used, as in ‘The weather was very cold: the temperature was –12 °C’ and ‘The image was viewed at a magnification of 10×’.
[1] http://blog.editage.com/the-use-of-the-space-character-in-expressing-qua...
[2] Style Manual Committee, Council of Biology Editors. 1994. Scientific Style and Format: the CBE manual for authors, editors, and publishers, 6th edn, pp. 212–213. Cambridge University Press.
["Publish and prosper" is a series of posts about tips for researchers whose first language is not English but who submit papers to journals published in English. The series touches upon not only writing (spelling, grammar, punctuation, usage, and style) but everything else relevant to publishing research papers that journal editors wish their authors knew.]
Few books come this close to the theme of this series of blog posts as What Editors Want: an author’s guide to scientific journal publishing [1]. (The title of the chapter on preparing a manuscript for publication includes the phrase ‘What editors wish you knew’.) The first chapter makes it clear who the book is for and why they should read it: ‘many young researchers have almost no idea of what obstacles they’ll encounter, and how to get to the finish line—a published paper—as quickly and painlessly as possible. The aim of this book is to address the needs of these novice authors.’
The authors make it clear early on that their book is not about writing research papers but about getting published. Accordingly, the book begins by assuming that researchers have completed their research and have analysed the results and that the findings are new and valid, and takes it up from there. The early chapters tell readers how to judge whether their research is new and how to choose the right journal.
An innovative feature of the book are mini essays by other ‘officials in the publishing game’: journal editors, publishers and publication managers, librarians, media experts, and so on. You can read what the Executive Editor of Science, for example, has to say on honesty in authorship and that of PNAS (Proceedings of the [US] National Academy of Sciences on ethics in scientific publishing.
The book will prove particularly useful to non-native speakers of English since it is based on the workshop the authors gave in mainland China. Several useful appendixes point readers to additional resources, up to date and carefully chosen, on advice on writing, databases that offer free access to articles and abstracts, free or low-cost sources of images, and so on.
All in all, a welcome addition indeed to the already impressive series titled Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing.
[1] Benson P J and Silver S C. 2013. What Editors Want: an author’s guide to scientific journal publishing. University of Chicago Press. 178 pp. [The year given in citations and references is the year that appears in the copyright notice; the book under review has already been published.]
["Publish and prosper" is a series of posts about tips for researchers whose first language is not English but who submit papers to journals published in English. The series touches upon not only writing (spelling, grammar, punctuation, usage, and style) but everything else relevant to publishing research papers that journal editors wish their authors knew.]
Getting the citations and references right can be tricky—most researchers also consider it trivial. However, journals insist that authors follow the style recommended for references meticulously. This series of blog posts has dealt with the topic in excruciating detail but perhaps what researchers need most is a handy source that can show by example how the bibliographic details of different kinds of sources – papers in journals, chapters in multi-author volumes, books, conference proceeding, and so on – are to be presented in many different styles, which often have terse and cryptic names (MLA, APA, Chicago, and so on).
Charles Lipson’s Cite Right [1], now in its second edition, is not only that handy guide but also offers sound advice on the whole issue of citing and referencing: why cite at all, what should be cited and what need not be cited, and so on. The book is dedicated to the author’s students, which explains how it manages to include such nuts-and-bolts matters as breaking long URLs into two or more lines, handling references to papers with very many authors, and when to include the name of the (US) state along with the name of the city in giving the place of publication, all explained in a lively style that serves to make this dry topic particularly palatable.
Whether you are a chemist, an anthropologist, an economist, or a mathematician, Cite Right will steer you clear of the minefield that citing and referencing can be.
[1] Lipson C. 2011. Cite Right: a quick guide to Citations styles—MLA, APA, Chicago, the Sciences, professions, and more. University of Chicago Press. 213 pp.
["Publish and prosper" is a series of posts about tips for researchers whose first language is not English but who submit papers to journals published in English. The series touches upon not only writing (spelling, grammar, punctuation, usage, and style) but everything else relevant to publishing research papers that journal editors wish their authors knew.]
Health care or healthcare? Policy makers or policymakers? Web site or website? The Oxford Dictionary of English (3rd edition, 2010) makes each a single word. Copy editors struggle with such trivial decisions every day—and often end up disagreeing with one another. Trouble is, there is no single widely accepted source, and even the same source may change its recommendation with time. The Concise Oxford Dictionary, for instance, used to hyphenate co-operation but later switched to cooperation.
The BBC reported that the sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (6th edition, 2007) ‘knocked the hyphens out of 16,000 words, many of them two-word compound nouns. Fig-leaf is now fig leaf, pot-belly is now pot belly, pigeon-hole has finally achieved one word status as pigeonhole and leap-frog is feeling whole again as leapfrog.’
As the above quote illustrates, a hyphenated word can change in either direction: it can lose the hyphen altogether to become one word (co-operation to cooperation) or the hyphen may be replaced with a space, the result being two separate words (ice-cream to ice cream).
As a researcher, you can help by being consistent: make your choice and stick to it; the copy editor can always use the Find and Replace routine if your choice happens to be different from that preferred by the journal’s publisher.
["Publish and prosper" is a series of posts about tips for researchers whose first language is not English but who submit papers to journals published in English. The series touches upon not only writing (spelling, grammar, punctuation, usage, and style) but everything else relevant to publishing research papers that journal editors wish their authors knew.]
15%The most meticulous study may be rejected if the Discussion is not impressive. Learn to write a Discussion that will do justice to your research.