Scientific writing: easy when you know how

308 Pages·2002·1.554 MB·English

by  Jennifer Peat, Elizabeth Elliott, Louise Baur, Victoria Keena

Scientific Writing
Easy when you know how
Scientific Writing
Easy when you
know how
Jennifer Peat
Associate Professor, Department of Paediatrics and Child Health,
University of Sydney and Hospital Statistician, The Children’s
Hospital at Westmead, Sydney, Australia
Elizabeth Elliott
Associate Professor, Department of Paediatrics and Child Health,
University of Sydney and Consultant Paediatrician, The Children’s
Hospital at Westmead, Sydney, Australia
Louise Baur
Associate Professor, Department of Paediatrics and Child Health,
University of Sydney and Consultant Paediatrician The Children’s
Hospital at Westmead, Sydney, Australia
Victoria Keena
Information Manager, Institute of Respiratory Medicine, Sydney,
Australia
© BMJ Books 2002
BMJ Books is an imprint of the BMJ Publishing Group
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording and/or
otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.
First published in 2002
by BMJ Books, BMA House, Tavistock Square,
London WC1H 9JR
www.bmjbooks.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7279 1625 4
Typeset by SIVA Math Setters, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in Spain by GraphyCems, Navarra
Contents
Introduction xi
Acknowledgements xii
Foreword xiii
1 Scientific writing 1
Reasons to publish 1
Rewards for being a good writer 3
Making it happen 5
Achieving creativity 7
Thought, structure and style 8
The thrill of acceptance 9
2 Getting started 12
Forming a plan 12
Choosing a journal 17
Uniform requirements 21
Instructions to authors 23
Standardised reporting guidelines 24
Authorship 29
Contributions 41
3 Writing your paper 48
Abstract 49
Introduction 51
Methods 54
Results 63
Discussion 85
Summary guidelines 89
4 Finishing your paper 93
Choosing a title 93
Title page 100
References and citations 101
Peer review 106
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Scientific Writing
Processing feedback 109
Checklists and instructions to authors 110
Creating a good impression 112
Submitting your paper 115
Archiving and documentation 116
5 Review and editorial processes 121
Peer reviewed journals 121
Revise and resubmit 125
Replying to reviewers’ comments 127
Handling rejection 130
Editorial process 132
Page proofs 133
Copyright laws 135
Releasing results to the press 136
Becoming a reviewer 138
Writing review comments 140
Becoming an editor 143
6 Publishing 147
Duplicate publication 147
Reporting results from large studies 149
Policies for data sharing 150
Fast tracking and early releases 152
Electronic journals and eletters 153
Netprints 155
Citation index 157
Impact factors 158
7 Other types of documents 165
Letters 165
Editorials 168
Narrative reviews 169
Systematic reviews and Cochrane reviews 172
Case reports 176
Post-graduate theses 178
8 Writing style 188
Plain English 188
Topic sentences 189
Subjects, verbs and objects 191
vvii
Contents
Eliminating fog 192
Say what you mean 195
Word order 197
Creating flow 199
Tight writing 202
Chopping up snakes 206
Parallel structures 208
Style matters 210
9 Grammar 214
Nouns 215
Adjectives 219
Verbs 221
Adverbs 229
Pronouns and determiners 231
Conjunctions and prepositions 235
Phrases 239
Clauses 240
Which and that 243
Grammar matters 244
10 Word choice 246
Label consistently 246
Participants are people 248
Word choice 250
Avoid emotive words 251
Because 253
Levels and concentrations 255
Untying the negatives 255
Abbreviations 257
Spelling 258
Words matter 259
11 Punctuation 261
Full stops and ellipses 261
Colons and semicolons 262
Commas 263
Apostrophes 266
Parentheses and square brackets 267
Slashes, dashes and hyphens 270
Punctuation matters 271
vii
Scientific Writing
12 Support systems 273
Searching the internet 273
Writers’ groups 274
Avoiding writer’s block 281
Mentoring 282
Index 288
viii
Introduction
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those who move easiest have learnt to dance.
Alexander Pope (1688–1744)*
Everything is easy when you know how! The skill of scientific
writing is no exception. To be a good writer, all you need to do
is learn and then follow a few simple rules. However, it can be
difficult to get a good grasp on the rules if your learning
experience is a protracted process of trial and error. There is
nothing more discouraging than handing a document that
has taken hours to write to a coworker who takes a few
minutes to cover it in red pen and expects you to find this a
rewarding learning exercise.
Fortunately, there is a simple way into the more fulfilling
experience of writing so that readers don’t feel the need to
suggest corrections for every sentence in every paragraph.
Once you can write what you mean, put your content in the
correct order, and make your document clear and pleasurable
for others to read, you can consider yourself an expert writer.
By developing good writing skills, you will receive more
rewarding contributions from your coauthors and reviewers
and more respect from the academic community. If you can
produce a document that is well written, the review process
automatically becomes a fulfilling contribution of academic
ideas and thoughts rather than a desperate rescue attempt for
bad grammar and disorganisation. This type of peer review is
invaluable for improving the quality of your writing.
If your research is important for progressing scientific
thinking or for improving health care, it deserves to be
presented in the best possible way so that it will be published
in a well-respected journal. This will ensure that your results
reach a wide range of experts in your field. To use this process
to promote your reputation, you will need to write clearly and
concisely. Scientific writing is about using words correctly and
*The opening quote was produced with permission from Collins Concise
Dictionary of Quotations, 3rd edn. London: Harper Collins, 1998: p 241.
ix
Scientific Writing
finding a precise way to explain what you did, what you
found, and why it matters. Your paper needs to be a clear
recipe for your work:
• you need to construct an introduction that puts your work
in context for your readers and tells them why it is
important;
• your methods section must leave readers in no doubt what
you did and must enable them to reproduce your work if
they want to;
• you must present your results so that they can be easily
understood, and discuss your findings so that readers
appreciate the implications of your work.
In this book, we explain how to construct a framework for your
scientific documents and for the paragraphs within so that
your writing becomes orderly and structured. Throughout the
book, we use the term “paper” to describe a document that is
in the process of being written and the term “journal article” to
describe a paper that has been published. At the end of some
chapters, we have included lists of useful web sites and these
are indicated by a reference in parenthesis (www1) in the text.
We also explain how the review and editorial process
functions and we outline some of the basic rules of grammar
and sentence construction. Although there is sometimes a
relaxed attitude to grammar, it is important to have a few basic
rules under your belt if you want to become a respected writer.
To improve your professional status, it is best to be on high
moral ground and write in a grammatically correct way so
that your peers respect your work. You should not live in the
hope that readers and editors will happily sort through
muddled thoughts, struggle through verbose text, or tolerate
an uninformed approach. Neither should you live in the
hope that the journal and copy editors will rescue your worst
grammatical mistakes. No one can guarantee that such safety
systems will be in place and, to maintain quality and integrity
in the research process, we should not expect other people to
provide a final rescue system for poor writing.
The good news is that learning to write in a clear and correct
way is easy. By following the guidelines presented in this book,
the reporting of research results becomes a simple, rewarding
process for many professional and personal reasons. We have
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