Scientific writing 3.0: A reader and writer's guide - Jean-Luc Lebrun, Justin Lebrun 2021

Learn from principles, not examples
Strategic writing
The reading toolkit

I have claimed that learning from examples is poor practice. To justify this claim, I argued that given the poor level of scientific writing, an average paper would make a poor exemplar of how to write well. But let’s now imagine that you are fortunate, and that you have a mentor who has earmarked a list of well-written papers for you to study. Do you now believe you have enough to succeed?

Let’s briefly consider this situation in terms of a cooking analogy. If, while cooking, you follow a recipe book to the letter, using all the proper ingredients, temperatures, cooking times, and equipment, can you achieve a great-tasting dish? Yes. But does following a recipe give you an understanding of how flavour profiles interact, how sweet and sour tastes combine masterfully, or when to use a specific herb or spice to enhance a type of dish? No. There is an immense difference between an excellent cook and a chef. Between someone who can apply the rules and someone who understands them intimately.

Writing is no different. While one can learn to write well-structured sentences from good examples, more effort is required to deeply understand the rules of writing and apply them strategically. You might observe, for example, that the passive voice is used far more rarely in well-written papers. Subsequently, applying that finding to one’s own papers should, in theory, increase their similarity to the well-written exemplars. But an overall reduction of the passive voice, without an understanding of when and how it remains useful, could backfire in key areas. Copying from good papers may address the symptoms of bad writing, but it does not bring you closer to understanding the underlying problems, or to finding a cure.

In order to become a chef (in writing), you need to understand the fundamental principles of writing and reading, and build up your knowledge from there. Doing so clears away any false assumptions you may have gained during your education or work (sadly, many plague the scientific writing style, as we will see later in this book).

For writers, what are these fundamental principles? As the job of all writers is to be understood by the reader, the principles are reader-centered. They include understanding the physiological limitations of any reader, such as limited memory, attention, motivation, or patience; the limitations of the reader’s existing knowledge, or the limitations linked to the serial process of reading itself and its dependence on expectations. All of these will be covered in this book.

Flowery, grandiose, and abstract writing may temporarily sound impressive, but it often fails to accomplish the most basic task of communication: to help the reader understand. Great writing eschews the need to impress the reader and focuses on getting its message across clearly.

¹ The impact factor of journals is calculated over 3 years from the date of publication. After 3 years, the impact factor remains fixed even if citations continue to grow.

² E.g. slower for physics, faster for biochemistry.

³ Different types of papers also have different best before dates. Review papers, for example, tend to have longer shelf lives as their purpose is not only to highlight novelty but also to act as a go-to resource for incoming researchers in a field.

⁴ www.researchgate.net

⁵ www.academia.edu

⁶ https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7020034 “Ten hot topics around scholarly publishing” (2019)

⁷ Dallmeier-Tiessen, S. et al. Preprint available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.5260 (2011).

⁸ 52 readers x $35, minus publishing cost of $900.

⁹ The University of California’s 10 campuses downloaded articles “nearly 1 million times” from Elsevier in 2018, and paid USD$10.5 million for the service. Even discounted from $35 per article, we can roughly work out that the discount comes to >$10 per download, a far higher number than the aforementioned 37 cents.

¹⁰ https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science

¹¹ https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.a568

¹² Including prestigious UC schools like UC Berkeley and UCLA (ranked 27th and 32nd respectively in QS world university rankings). UC is responsible for 10% of all US publishing output.

¹³ E.g. https://beallslist.net

¹⁴ Wallace, Jasmine. How to Be A Good Peer Reviewer. The Scholarly Kitchen, 2019 https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2019/09/17/how-to-be-a-good-peer-reviewer/

¹⁵ Have a paper to publish? Good! Try Science and Nature first. Couldn’t get in? Try submitting to a Tier 2 journal. Couldn’t get in? Try submitting to a tier 3 journal. Couldn’t get in? Try submitting to a...

¹⁶ https://www.aje.com/arc/how-to-write-presubmission-inquiry-academic-journal/

¹⁷ Remember, this is an average. Some reviewers responded that it took them only 5 or 10 minutes!

¹⁸ Thorndike, E. L., “A Constant Error in Psychological Ratings,” 1920

¹⁹ As opposed to the halo effect’s positive associations, negative associations are called the horn effect.

²⁰ A famous example of the halo effect can be seen in the trial of American sports star Orenthal James “OJ” Simpson for the murder of his wife. He was so loved as a sports idol that many Americans initially supported his innocence, despite these two elements having no relationship to each other.

²¹ A partial expert is non-expert in some areas of your paper and expert in others.

²² Although this is generally the situation in 2020, changes in the industry and in regulation are increasingly aiming to remove the money factor from scientific publishing. A handful of journals have started paying reviewers a token sum for their time ($80-$100). Regulation-wise, you may have heard of the Council for the European Union’s decision that any EU publicly funded research needs to be freely available from 2020 onwards.

²³ “Mostly”, because journals are not as interested in publishing negative findings, leading to significant wastage of research time and money into avenues of research which may already have been found to be dead ends (but were never published).

²⁴ The medical specialty dealing with kidney function and diseases