How to write and publish a scientific paper - Barbara Gastel, Robert A. Day 2022

Some common language challenges
How to write science in english as a foreign language
Scientific style

In writing scientific papers, nonnative speakers of English often face challenges relating to particular aspects of the English language—especially verb tenses, prepositions, and articles. With care, authors can minimize errors in these regards. Then, if the manuscript is clearly written, a copy editor at the journal can correct remaining errors.

Verb tenses, which differ among languages, often pose difficulty. As discussed in Chapter 30, the methods and results sections of a scientific paper should normally be written entirely, or almost entirely, in the past tense. The introduction and discussion typically include a variety of tenses, depending on whether, for example, previously established knowledge is being presented (present tense) or the research reported in the present paper is being summarized (past tense). As well as following the general advice in this book, look at the use of verb tenses in the journal to which you are submitting your manuscript.

Deciding which preposition to use can be difficult, even sometimes for native speakers of English. Keeping a list of prepositional phrases commonly used in your field can help. So can consulting textbooks and websites intended to guide nonnative speakers of English.

Likewise, proper use of articles (a, an, and the) can be very difficult, especially for writers whose native languages do not contain articles. Here, too, it can help to consult textbooks and websites for users of English as a foreign language and to use published papers as examples. Other sources of guidance on various aspects of English include the book Scientific English (Day and Sakaduski 2011).

Other often-challenging aspects of English include plurals, mass nouns, capitalization, and sentence length and structure. Some authors from native languages without plural forms tend to forget to add an s to make English nouns plural. And some nonnative speakers tend mistakenly to add an s to mass nouns (such as information and research). Native users of languages that do not have capital letters, or that follow different capitalization rules from those for English, sometimes neglect to capitalize English words when needed or capitalize excessively. Authors whose native languages tend to have very long sentences sometimes write sentences that should be several sentences in English. And sometimes nonnative speakers use English words but retain the sentence structure of their native language, with awkward results. (A peer reviewer told an international colleague of ours that her sentences resembled those of the character Yoda!) If any of these aspects of English tend to pose difficulty for you, perhaps pay special attention to them when you revise your writing.

Native writers of some languages tend to have difficulty with spacing in English-language text. For example, sometimes they neglect to skip a space after the period at the end of a sentence, or they insert a space between an opening parenthesis and the word that follows, or they make many spacing errors in bibliographic references. If you tend to have this difficulty, check your manuscript carefully for proper spacing.