Everyone seems to be writing papers at the moment. The other day in the office, two of my labmates were sitting at a computer, thrashing through the proto-Results section of their jointly first-authored magnum opus. In such close quarters, the rest of us were unable to avoid being included in the audible brainstorming process.
I started thinking, then, how many stock phrases occur in manuscripts. Why is it, for example, that adverbs like ‘interestingly’ seem always to be deployed for the most boring results? When I voiced this rhetorical question aloud, we decided to stage an impromptu competition for more original adverbs.
“Earth-shatteringly, there was no significant difference,” someone proposed, getting into the spirit. Other top picks included ‘astonishingly’, ‘tantalizingly’, ‘mind-bogglingly’, and – a personal favorite – ‘Lo and behold’.
My own lab’s papers are not the only ones I’m helping out with, however. Over the past few months, word has spread throughout the institute that I used to be a journal editor. Now, I find that I have become an agony aunt of sorts. Hardly a day passes without someone making that pilgrimage up to the third floor, sheaf of papers in hand, to seek out my Delphic advice on various points of manuscript etiquette:
Does this cover letter sound too aggressive/wimpy/cocky/demure/over-confident/smarmy/fatalistic?
I realize they’ve rejected my paper outright. But if you read between the lines, do you think they might secretly want it back?
How can I imply that referee 2 is an imbecile without sounding defensive/insecure/unbalanced/violent/vindictive/petty?
Which of these experiments does the editor really want me to do, and which are just window-dressing?
Do you think I can buy four more weeks for this revision effort if I tell the editor that the first author is on maternity leave?
It’s only since I’ve been back in the lab that I’ve realized how much the publication process is like an elaborate mating game. With its rituals and codes, artifices and conventions, it is ultimately a relationship in which the authorial side was never meant to truly commune with the editorial. For me, understanding and empathizing with both sides is both a blessing and a curse. When it comes time to write up my own paper in a few months’ time, I can’t decide whether I’ll feel more like a schizophrenic or a double agent.
My PhD supervisor was (and still is) a big fan of the word notably. I wonder if he could ever be persuaded to switch to lo and behold.
Genomicron had a good translation guide a while ago.
Notably? Sigh.
How about this:
“Stultifyingly, all the controls revealed no unexpected nasty surprises.”
I have a nasty habit of using “counter-intuitively” or even “surprisingly”.
A student I used to co-supervise once tried to start a discussion section with the words “The human genome is a motley harlequin”. Unfortunately I had to edit it – but I kept the original on file for when I need cheering up.
Hahaha! That’s is brilliant, Cath. The human genome is a _________.
‘ragtag assortment of bin-ends’.
‘Counter-intuitively’ is relatively under-used, Brian. I like it; not as pretentious as ‘paradoxically’.
Jennifer, of course I may just have permanently faulty intuition.
Heh. Well, the referees will never know.
My previous boss is a fan of ‘strikingly’.
checks last joint manuscript from that lab
‘Orchestrate’. ‘Thus’. ‘Consistent’ – I suppose it’s good that we were able to use that word (not in the context of ‘not’, I hasten to add).
“The human genome, bewilderingly, works. No one is quite sure why, or how.”
Just opened up a review that begins
‘represents’ ‘powerful’ ‘tool’
‘biological macromolecules’
It’s … nonsense, innit? Guff.
The Polyfilla of science writing. Meaningless words to fill gaps in thinking.
An odd classic I learned/inherited from my advisor for things happening simultaneously – “concomitantly”
“Stultifyingly, all the controls revealed no unexpected nasty surprises.”
However, when that nasty surprise does arise, I sure wish that I would see “Disturbingly” a lot more…
‘Nerve-wrackingly’?
‘Orchestrate’ is an excellent word, Richard.
My first post-doctoral supervisor was a big fan of the verb ‘exacerbate’ – which rather loses its power after the fifth or sixth repetition.
Given his status as a paragon of logical, deductive reasoning, I think we should adopt the language of Sherlock Holmes when writing scientific papers.
“Indubitably, calcium was released from intracellular stores.”
“The DNA replicates through elementary Watson (and Crick) base pairing”.
“After meiosis, the gamete was afoot”.
Oh dear, oh dear.
Instead of ‘surprisingly’, how about ‘Great Scott!’
I was also reminded that chances of rejection increase exponentially when authors use the phrase ‘paradigm shift’ in their abstract.
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha breathe
Nice one, Matt.
Instead of ‘surprisingly’, how about ‘Great Scott!’
“Lord Nelson’s trousers!”
Cath – you were right to remove that. It should have been the first sentence of the introduction. And, if I do some work on human genomics, it will be. 🙂
I find myself using “therefore” too often. I try not to, but it’s just so easy.
OK, some good alternatives to ‘therefore’?
‘quod erat demonstrandum’ has a nice gravitas to it, and packs a whallop of retro geek chic.
‘ergo’
Thanks for posting this, Jenny, it gives me an
interestingstultifyingrevealinglambent insight into how the other half lives. It also makes me feel like some kind ofarchmagedemiurgeuber-God who must be propitiated withburnt offeringsfirstborn childrennice crisp tenners before I’ll consider their papers. In real life, editors are simple souls who always say what they mean. Directly. Unambiguously. Absolutely. It’s only authors who say things between the lines. But, oh, don’t let me stop you feeling the way you do. The power! The Power! The POWER!.After reading this I’m resolved to use my Tolkienian Reject Letter a bit more.
In the meantime, I shall award the
prestigioussesquipedlaiancoveted Order of the Unicycling Girrafe to anyone who can discover, in a peer-reviewed publication,Either the sentence that goes From the Abyssal Depths of the Bathyal Ooze comes an Eldritch Tale of Unspeakable Horror
Or the use of the word chthonic in a paper about the release of calcium from intracellular stores.
‘Game’, as they say, ‘on’.
There’s a few chthonics around, but I particularly like this one. This ain’t bad either.
Henry, Henry, Henry. What are we to do with you? You will have only yourself to blame for a rampant increase in Lovecraftian language in your submissions. You might enjoy it, but consider your poor colleagues.
My problem, as an author, is that I love using just the right word, but one has to keep in mind the foreign readership.
Jenny, I think the foreign readership are more likely to look things up in a dictionary than the autochthonous.
To my way of thinking the problem lies in the tendency of authors to write in the third person passive voice. It sounds grand and portentous but doesn’t exactly help understanding.
If you have the sentence:
“Surprisingly, all the experimental subjects died after exposure to Xenopeltis unicolor”
the reader thinks: “Am I supposed to be surprised, because I’m not, it was obvious that those mice were doomed if you treat them like that. So either the Authors think I’m stupid and would be surprised, or the authors themselves were surprised about the mice dying which makes them stupid.”
Or you could have:
“We were surprised to find that the mice had all been eaten by a sunbeam snake.”
No ambiguity there. If more people used the first person when writing scientific papers they would be a whole lot easier to read and so understand.
@Jenny: I’d love to see Lovecraftian words in Nature submissions. More seriously, any form of words that strays beyond the usual stream of third-person-passive cliche will make an editor’s job happier and will, I think, increase that manuscript’s chances of favorable consideration (_OMG, what I have I said?_)
starts madly thumbing through Roget
When I proof people’s papers, I try very hard to encourag them to ditch the passive voice, but it seems to horrify most people to use ‘we’. There might be some deep psychological reason why authors don’t want to take ownership of their own results.
Scientists don’t think of their papers as narratives, they think they are trying to construct an argument to convince the reader of the correctness of their conclusions. Perhaps this partly because a papers narrative is a false narrative; you can be pretty certain that the experiments weren’t performed in the order that they are described and there is very little mention of the false starts and blind alleys that dogged the real research.
The passive voice was preferred by referees of one of my papers. First person narrative was termed “unscientific” by them.
I’ve seen that happen too, especially with certain nationalities of scientists (no I’m not going to name names). I’d love to have the time to trace back where this obsession with the passive voice began. It is certainly a product of the second half of the 20th century.
Still, referees are not always right, especially when giving editorial opinions.
The manuscript was found to be lacking a certain gravitas. Clay figures of the reviewers were prepared, baked at 180C for thirty minutes, and punctured with stainless steel implements. The subjects were observed, then sacrificed and autopsied.
As it happens I have a paper, author doll in my desk draw, much punctured and very comforting.
I’d say what I had in my drawer, but not under my real name…
Active voice; “not scientific”? Ludicrous. Who are these people and what do they know about language?
Fortunately most editors are savvy to how much more readable a paper becomes in active voice, so aren’t going to care what referees think on that point.
I’m ashamed to say that my one and only published paper has the following eyewateringly awful title
The distinction between postcranial bones of Bos primigenius Bojanus, 1827 and Bison priscus Bojanus, 1827 from the British Pleistocene and the taxonomic status of Bos and Bison.
I had wanted to call it
How to tell the difference between cows and bison
because that’s what it’s about, but my Ph.D. advisor didn’t let me, on the grounds that ‘cows’ could refer to any female ungulate. It all went downhill from there.
On the subject of the stilted language used in science, I recall an anecdote of Isaac Asimov. He’d been a published author of SF stories for a decade before he had to sit down and write his Ph.D. After all those years trying to write well, he said, he was worried that he wouldn’t be able to write badly enough to get his doctorate.
Of course they do say that the international language of science is bad English.
The passive voice – on thinking about it more – has become, I think, a sort of formalized science-ese. In your impressionable young years you read papers like that, so when it comes time to write your own, you might be eager to emulate what you have absorbed. Almost as ritualistic as your first white coat (and I’m sure we all remember that magic moment), the urge to write “The cells were transfected” or “the results were obtained” – a jargonistic badge of honor – must be quite strong.
There is probably powerful psychology going on here.
@ Henry: You have cheated your readers out of the denoument of the Isaac Asimov anecdote. He was so worried that he wouldn’t be able to write badly enough that he wrote my favourite of all his short stories: “The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline”. A spoof scientific report about a substance that went into solution so fast that under some conditions it dissolved before you added solvent.
He published it in Astounding Science Fiction where it was supposed to come out under an alias but due to an error came out with his name on it. This was before his PhD viva. The story goes that the final question he was asked in his viva was about Thiotimoline rather than about the actual subject of his thesis.
A great Manu. from 2005 springs to mind – Prion Lexicon (out of control) Brown et al.
“Given the pressure from journals to
save space, the ubiquitous use of abbreviations
in medical literature has produced
setbacks both to ease of reading
and comprehension, but if abbreviations
must be used, the best pairing
would seem to be PrPC for the normal
cellular protein, and PrPTSE for any of its
disease-specific conformers. One might
even revert to plain English and dare to
use actual words, like normal cellular
protein, transition protein (molten
globule), and misfolded protein (or
amyloid protein), reducing the prion
lexicon to a level that does not intimidate
by its arcane and often inaccurate
terminology, and could be understood
by readers both within and without the
specialty.”
Paul Brown is one of the most experienced (>45 years) researchers in this field and like many others, I admire his candid views as above.
I am going through an article I am writing at the moment and I am excising the passive voice where I find it. And it is everywhere. Jennifer, I think you are correct, there is a subconcious force that acts upon us when we write “scientifically”. It is probably peer pressure or perceived peer pressure that forces this behaviour.
Brian, I think it’s especially strong in the Materials and Methods. For obvious reasons, perhaps: in a long string of actions, the ‘we did this/we did that’ can get a bit tedious. But good for you for resisting!
I always thought it would be quite daring to use first person active voice on the experimental parts that I actually did myself.
(“I added the buffer, then my mate from the lab across the hall threw it in the fridge for me a few hours later when I was down the pub”.)
He published it in Astounding Science Fiction where it was supposed to come out under an alias but due to an error came out with his name on it.
I don’t think it was an error. I think Asimov begged the Editor of Astounding, John W. Campbell (no relation to Philip Campbell, as far as I know), to run it under a pseudonym. The fact that Campbell ignored/misheard this plea is one of the great examples of accidently on purpose in SF publishing history. And The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline is indeed one of the great SF spoofs.
Endochronic is quite close to chthonic.
Graham, that’s a great passage about the prions. Many thanks.
How to tell the difference between cows and bison
Brummie accent: ‘You’re can’t wash your hands in a buffalo’
Nature recently published a Correspondence letter suggesting that “increase” and “decrease” be jettisoned from the scientific literature in favour of something more
interestingstriking.(“Recently” is also pretty much a banned word, by the way.)
Brian and Jennifer — the passive voice, sigh. I realised that we are all probably doomed at the point where one of my children was doing a primary school science SATS paper in which a mark was given for stating that scientific reports are in the passive voice (and deducted for choosing the active). There was no check box for “I am a Nature editor’s (and not just a Mad Professor’s [Allan Ahlberg]) daughter and I demand my money back.”
What can you do?
You can’t wash your hands in a buffalo
If I had £1 for every time I heard that during my PhD days, I’d have £873.
We had “abrogate” in my last lab. Everything was abrogated. Alos a fellow I heard of once wrote something like… “A double knock-in mutant such as this has not been heard of in all of mousedom.”
…mousedome. Just delightful.
I’m supposed to be experimenting right now (i.e. can’t be arsed to read all 45 comments), so I don’t know if this has been posted, but there was an article a couple of years back by a gasp social scientist who did a meta-analysis of the literature. Apparently us life-scientists are the absolute worst for needing to pimp our manuscripts with adverbs…
@Maxine
that’s very sad, and all too common. The trick I’m trying with my girls is to tell them that the truth is different from what you’re expected to write in an exam.
Along with Lo and Behold, you could use
Viola!
Hey Presto! (especially good for chemistry and quantum physics)
Wah-hey!
Zounds!
Goverment papers love to use the passive voice as well. Any time they can avoid making a clear statement, they will, just so they can’t be held to it if it’s wrong.
Viola!
.
.
.
BANG
“Viola!”
Sorry, I shouldn’t laugh, but that’s an absolutely gorgeous typo, Jeff. (There, by defusing the error harmlessly, I’ve saved you the wrath of the Grammar and Spelling Fascists that tend to lurk in my salon.)
Damn, our posts crossed. Well, Jeff, I tried.
Be very careful with your Voila and even Voici. When I worked in France many years ago, I was the unofficial and unpaid final reader of papers from my Boss. I used to call my self the this and that consultant because this was one of the items in English that caused most confusion to an excellent, non-native speaker, writer. That aside, I was often told that attempts by non-French speakers to use French phrases or French slang usually just did not work. Now I nderstand that many might believe Voila is completely purloined into colloquial English but I think it would be better if we stuck to our violas.
I often read poor English in the work submitted for assessment by students. The major stylistic (let us ignore grammar and spelling) errors are over use of informal, spoken style English and inappropriate words. There is a fine balance between a style that is easy to read and loss of rigour in description/analysis.
The difference between formal and informal English is very difficult for some non-native speakers to grasp. I once saw a draft thesis section from a foreign student that proclaimed a certain protein to have “tons of potential phosphorylation sites”.
Sorry Jeff – they don’t call me “Quickdraw” for nothing…
Cath – better than ‘oodles’? That’s a really good point, actually.
Brian – if the paper is written in English, the poor French are just going to have to learn what English speakers mean by their abuse of French. But I haven’t seen much French in scientific writing. (Though there must be, there must be. To tired to think of any.) I’ve seen a fair bit of Latin abuse, phrases not used quite in the way they should. But I am fond of Latin in papers when used properly – not sure Linda Cooper would agree with me on this point.
Talking of typos, speedy Richard noticed a good one of mine on Nautilus blog, in which I called Henry’s blog “End of the Peer Show”. You can see what my subconscious is telling my fingers to write when I am not paying attention.
Cath — agreed — Some paper-writing advice is here, with links to some free resources. Use of language such as the example you give is very common among papers submitted to and accepted by Nature, and is very easy for our subeditors to help the author by rephrasing– because although the use of English is not correct, exacerbated at an attempt at informality, it is clear what is meant (if you are reasonably scientifically informed). These kinds of papers are a joy to our subeditors compared with (dare I cast a slur) a common US habit of qualifying a noun with ten adjectives a couple of times in a sentence — in highly technical prose this kind of convolution is quite hard for a sub to unravel because there is little clear intentional thought behind the phrasing.
forgot to preview — “exacerbated by”, sorry.
Apologies for hogging the comments, Jenny, but what I popped over to write, before I got distracted by the above, was a response to your post. “Exquisitely”. Does anyone remember when the vogue (not viola) for that word suddenly blossomed? Every news and views article submitted to Nature (so it must have been when I was news and views ed, I suppose) had the phrase “exquisitely sensitive” or similar. “Exquisite” was probably used once in a paper by someone who “had a bit of a way with words” and was immediately pounced upon by all those people stuck on “very”, “extremely” etc, desperate for a bit of variety.
I remember that, Maxine! How strange, these fashion trends. A related one is ‘elegant’ – it’s a classic that is still in common use, though more often in talks than in print. ‘An elegant series of experiments’: I think there is no higher accolade permitted in the competitive, jostling scrum.
I propose the substitution of the word ‘preternatural’ for ‘exquisite’.
End of the Peer Show: I should like to distance myself from that typo, being a strong supporter of The Other Place and the process of peer review. I have yet to find a manuscript, though, for whom all the appropriate peers are Peers.
Actually I had a question about the original post (shocking I know), prompted by this;
How can I imply that referee 2 is an imbecile without sounding defensive/insecure/unbalanced/violent/vindictive/petty?
Why is it always Referee #*2* that is the negative one? Referee 1 says ‘this is the most brilliant piece of work in the field since Newton developed elastic shoe laces’ and Referee 2 says ‘this is such a pile of unreconstructed dung that I couldn’t even be bothered reading past the author list’. Referee 3 then usually provides a detailed list of irritating but reasonable issues that you then have to deal with properly.
Interesting Cameron !!
On the subject of Open Referee’s, check out this likes of here
Ref 2 is anon but Ref 1 is none other than Katsu aka Prof Katsumi Doh-ura who I know fairly well.
I appreciate that there are mixed views about Open Refereeing. This Paper was one of the first where I’ve actually seen this being done.
I’ve got one paper in PLoS ONE but there the referees didn’t offer to make the comments public. One coming out soon so we’ll see about that. I’ve not done any refereeing for them but would generally be happy to make my comments public (and attributed). But this is understandably scarey territory for lots of people. There is a good argument that anonymity protects referees and the process from abuse. It opens it up to new forms of abuse of course but that’s the way the world works. Unfortunately nothing is perfect.
Henry — I immediately corrected the typo in my Nautilus post when it was pointed out, so consider yourself distanced. I too am a big fan of peer-review.
Cameron – we had some discussion about this at the Ask the Editor forum and Peer to Peer blog. As a longstanding manuscript editor, I can attest that one frequent problem for referees who name themselves is the lobbying, begging and bullying they receive from authors who are revising their manuscripts to “cave in” over various of their comments. Not a pretty sight, and the paper is the loser.
Maxine – yes I can imagine that’s the case. I was actually surprised on the link Graham sent that one of the referees was identified. I had thought that even in the PLoS ONE process there wasn’t any option to name yourself. Probably recapitulating a conversation you’ve already had but is there ever any benefit in referees and authors having a more direct discussion? You can imagine that a direct conversation could be more productive.
I have just refereed a bad paper but I would hope that the editor could convey my misgivings to the authors and explain why it was so truly awful. I think identifying referees is a bad idea. Anyway there is enjoyment of a sorts in trying to identify them from their comments and/or opinions.
Regarding the passive voice, I understood that the rationale behind this is to convey objectivity, since the goal of science is to produce an objective, rather than subjective, account of the world – ie one that is consistent for everyone. If you start to include I, the royal we or the plural we, then you admit to subjectivity of your results. Which might be true, but doesn’t really support the scientific ideal.
There are ways to write clearly in the passive voice. Removing a lot of ‘It is a fact that’ and similar phrases tends to help. But I agree that trying to get a coherent sentence out of a student is a challenge – at least the passive voice provides them with an unfamiliar framework through which they need to think through their arguments to phrase them. I find too many students who use active voice also then leave out, for example, verbs. It’s probably because they are thinking faster than they write if it is in a familiar form …
I don’t think that this is the right place to open up a discussion of the pros and cons of anonymous refereeing and the making public of referees’ reports. What I will say is that at PLoS ONE the default is for referees to be anonymous unless they say otherwise and for reports to be posted alongside the published paper unless the referees object.
On the subject of referee order though I once met an editor who claimed to routinely alter the order of referees depending on the decision they wanted to convey. Negative decisions were ordered so that the reports became increasingly harsh; positive decisions were supported by having the supportive refs’ comments at the end.
I liked the story of the author who had used ‘We’ throughout the writing of a paper. When it came back from the journal, they loved the paper but thought it odd they had used ‘we’ when there was only one author. The author couldn’t be bothered re-writing so added the name of their cat. Which was fine until the requests started coming in for the cat to come and give give talks on the work…
I think you’re referring to Marilyn Kozak. But the version of the story I heard was that she was pressured to add another author because the journal said nobody would believe a paper’s worth of research could be done alone (although it was). Or that’s the urban myth anyway.
About this: ‘Regarding the passive voice, I understood that the rationale behind this is to convey objectivity, since the goal of science is to produce an objective, rather than subjective, account of the world.’
Poppycock. Why is “The buffers were prepared” more objective that “We prepared the buffers’? And the latter is certainly a lot more precise; the buffers didn’t prepare themselves, that’s for sure.
@ Cameron.
Reminds me of the Dead Cat gets a Diploma for $60 (true) story from a couple of years ago.
Cameron — Maybe we should head off to the publishing new millennium or the ask the editor forum to continue, as there are existing threads there about the peer-review process? It is always nice to capture these things somewhere logical (or, as Matt would attest, tagged!) so others can share. Not that I am trying to curtail Jenny’s comment thread, by any means!
Ha ha! Maxine just totally moderated jenny’s comments thread!! When I do stuff like that she hits me 🙁
I did a few months training as editor for Molecular Systems Biology and I really think this sort of short exposure to the editorial/publishing side of science could be a part of regular science training. We get to appreciate more the sorts of decisions editors have to make. I also would like to see editors having a stronger say in the research agenda. They spend so much time reading, researching and deciding what should be interesting for a certain community, why not be more vocal about their ideas ?
I actually did mean to say Viola! It’s a Southern American thing. Southern, not South. Maybe it’s all over America. I don’t know. I don’t get out much.
“Upon turning shutting off the lights, Viola! The possum had begun to glow, thanks to a healthy dose of radiation, thus proving beyond any shadow of a doubt that a possum could indeed be made to glow interestingly.”
@Pedro: I also would like to see editors having a stronger say in the research agenda. They spend so much time reading, researching and deciding what should be interesting for a certain community, why not be more vocal about their ideas ?
That, Pedro, is a very interesting topic. Ooh, I feel a blog entry coming on.
-Pedro, that would be great, if more people could have that kind of training. The NPG internship programme is currently open, as advertised at Ask The Editor forum and other points.
Ian – I am just terrified of that Matt Brown and his tags. Now after what you write I’m equally terrified of getting a black
eyemark from Jenny.Maxine, I will tolerate a lot more from you than from Brooks! And I won’t be offended if you all scurry away and talk about more interesting things behind my back.
But I will say, here, that most scientists are completely in the dark about the editorial process. What sort of winds me up is a particular attitude (often voiced by older male scientists in the biomedical sphere): who are these young girls, these “failed scientists”, to decide the fate of my work of genius? What do they know?
There seems to be this idea that only great scientists can be great editors. But actually, it seems clear to me that the two professions are completely distinct and require distinct skills. In fact, many scientists seem unable to step outside of their work and see it in the bigger picture, which is what journalists do rather well. I’ve had some experience on journals where scientists had hands-on editing roles, and often it was remarkably amateur.
So yes, more exposure to what professional editors actually do might at least engender more respect for the complexity of the job amongst authors.
What sort of winds me up is a particular attitude (often voiced by older male scientists in the biomedical sphere): who are these young girls, these “failed scientists”, to decide the fate of my work of genius? What do they know?
Jenny, you touch on an extremely interesting subject. As an
oldermiddle-aged malefailed scientisteditor, I notice that most of my immediate colleagues are women. Sometimes I am the only male at the lunch table, and the topics of conversation sometimes stray into areas which … well, suffice it to say I wonder whether decorum demands my absence. But seriously, it’s been the case that as long as I’ve been at Nature, the proportion of female editors has been higher, I suspect, than among scientists. I wonder, first, if that’s really true – and second, if it is true, why? The problems faced by female scientists in the workplace are too numerous to be worth mentioning in an audience who’ll know what they are better than I do. I have a suspicion, though, that the nomadic career structure of science, especially at Postdoc level, has something to do with it. And there’s also sexism …The stat that I’ve seen is 80% women in editorial, Henry, but I can’t recall the specifics of the study. It’s certainly true in the places I’ve been.
I think there actually is some truth in the ‘failed science’ moniker; in the life science across Europe, the stats are something on average like at 50/50 female/male at the PhD level, 40/60 at the postdoctoral, 20/80 at the lower prof level and 10/90 at senior level. They have to go someplace, these women. But my point was that these women could do anything afterward: the choice to enter into editorial and excel at it is not really relevant. you might as well call a scientist a ‘failed editor’. (And judging by the manuscripts I routinely see, this would be pretty accurate!)
Those who can, do science. Those who can’t, edit.
The statistic of 80% seems about right, Jenny. I wish it were more like 50/50. I’m on thin ice saying this, but sometimes I wish my office were a little more blokey than it is.
You love it really.
No, I have to say it gets on my nerves. It sometimes gets far too twittery for my liking. But what really irritates me is when a colleague on maternity leave comes in with a baby, and all the female members of staff – even the most hard-bitten, careerist and avowedly non-maternal – are attracted to to it as if they were on bungee cords, cooing loudly, and the air gets soggy with estrogen. In circumstances like these it becomes very hard to concentrate on, say, the phylogenetic significance of the reflected lamina on the angular.
Re-checking my unfinished dissertation I am horrified with the language. It is about 3/4 written and I have no time or inclination to rewrite the whole thing, just add what is missing. So, a bunch of paragraphs of passive-voice sentences staring with “However” will be interspersed with paragraphs written in a bloggy style. Horror!
My lab mate and I have a lifelong standing deal to always make sure that all of our published papers for the rest of our careers contain the word “elusive”.
Oh, and our PI did not let us title one of our papers “In vitro veritas”. Bummer. It faithfully represented the findings of the paper, after all.
Bora, what a great title! Almost makes up for the existence of a thesis with sentences starting with ‘however’.
Elusive – now that’s a fine word. I once had a labmate who was dared to use the word ‘hegemony’ in one of his, but he got into trouble, needless to say.
Jennifer, your salon is as always very entertaining. Stock phrases are of course also common in scientific talks, but there you can at least play science bingo. Whenever the speaker uses one of those typical phrases, you can write down that phrase on a piece of paper. Loud shouts of bingo could also be added, but would probably be too disturbing.
How perfectly delightful, Martin. I’m not sure our Head of Department would approve of any outbursts, but we could hold up discreet pieces of paper with the word ‘Bingo’ printed on it in small letters.
One of the most overused adjectives in talks is ‘talented’ – as in, this datum was produced by X, “a talented graduate student in my lab”. I always wince, pitying all the untalented ones he’s not mentioning.
Cue Seminar Bingo as posted recently by O’Hara et al
A friend of mine (the young lady who featured in a recent lablit story actually) works for a Federal Bankruptcy Judge here in Memphis. She has to write all his opinions after ruling etc., and he always gives her a word to try and include. They often use the Dictionary of Lost Words. I wish we could do something like that (and of course, get away with it too!).
Graham, thanks for the link. Seminar Bingo could actually evolve into something fun and useful.
Ah, the Dictionary of Lost Words. Thank you Ian, thank you. I’ve died and gone to heaven. The fact that they all have a Lovecraft fixation only makes it better. Ai! The Horror! *The HORROR!!!*
Counter-intuitively? Is that another word for applying thinking processes that go against intellectual inquiry, as in dumbly
That’s what I learned in doctoral school, take one word and see if you can’t make it into six, seven, eleven. It’s almost as though you have to learn to write again after you emerge into the light. But since I deal mostly with undergraduate papers, I’m just glad to see “in which” in the right place.
Christine, do not despair. Some authors are trying to better themselves. I think it honestly does not occur to most of us until it is pointed out, that ’tis better to say something in one word than half a dozen. Once you realize this, it’s amazing how quickly everything improves.
(Actually, that’s rather ‘counter-intuitive’. One would assume a priori that more words would be more precise than one. But it’s true: less is more, for almost everything that counts.)
less is more
Except in Linux, where it’s not even a symlink.
/geek joke.
What sort of winds me up is a particular attitude (often voiced by older male scientists in the biomedical sphere): who are these young girls, these “failed scientists”, to decide the fate of my work of genius? What do they know?
Is the “failed scientist” part about editors also true for science bloggers? Is the “real” scientist to busy to blog or even read blogs?
Martin – you’ve just made yourself very unpopular.
Henry – I trust you will abuse your new resource when writing Nature editorials. Hmm, I also see a bizarre form of syncho-blogging arising from this.
Henry – I trust you will abuse your new resource when writing Nature editorials.
Just try and stop me…
I like to think that many of us aren’t failed…but then again if we were really gung ho we’ve be in the lab, not writing.
We’re not failed scientists – we’re succesful writers. Jenny’s lab experience (detailed somewhere way, way above this comment, as the plankton is above the abyss) shows that her talents as a writer and editor are in demand from her fellow scientists, many of whom are not as gifted in the communication department as she is.
It’s a fact that some people are better writers than others, in the same way that some people can do the long jump or can recognized a bar-tailed godwit from half a mile away or can commit origami, whereas others can’t, or choose not to. I know editors who don’t have the patience for blogging – and experience shows that there are many scientists who, despite the importance of communication, and despite their earnest wish to communicate more effectively, are as good at writing in a straight line on a moving planet as is a benzedrine-stoked boxer at peeling a banana.
Just successfully shaved a 550 word abstract down to 300. Who knows if it makes sense anymore…
Actually I was thinking, who wrote all this extended verbiage and then realised I did. But most of it was repitition to try and get the message across. Now the paper is accepted we can cut it back down again 🙂
Actually, Cameron, the funny thing about words is that sometimes the message gets through better if you don’t repeat yourself or over-explain. Readers, I think, are easily distracted and start to skim at a moment’s…hey, pay attention!
I just helped someone pare an abstract to 150. Now that is short, if you have six or seven key results.
This was a classic case of a paper that’s been so tweaked about in response to so many referees with different issues over such a long period of time that the message had got a bit lost. But yes, I think its probably better now. But 150 words! Yikes that’s tough.
For those interested in abstracts, we just had a discussion about the pros and cons of structured abstracts in the Good Paper Journal Club. The context was heart attacks after watching the Football World Cup in 2006.
Does biology require more explanation. I attach the instructions to Authors concerning Abstracts for Acta Materialia (considered top journal for full length original papers in Structural Materials Science).
Abstract will be published in Acta Materialia in English for all papers. The abstract should indicate the content of the paper, and should describe the main conclusions. An effective abstract is brief and normally less than 100 words. Abstracts must not exceed 150 words.
oh… I am so blushing at the moment reading this since I am part of the “I kind of like the passive voice as part of science papers” 😉
I do think that the passive voice might be easier to get around for people who are not native English speakers [example; me]. I think someone mentioned it but from my own experience nothing is as hard as trying to sound “like one of the ‘crowd’ when there are smaller differences in when to use x or y”. (I don’t want to think about all the mistakes I have made the previous years in talking, much less in writing.)
I’d rather stick with impeccable correct [trying to anyway] and formal English (at least it is easier for someone to say ‘this is wrong since I found it in the dictionary/grammar book’). Then the other option would be to hand the correct (and sometimes boring) paper over to a native speaker and say ‘can you spice this up a little?!’. We can always call it ‘editing and proof reading’ prior to submitting it to a real journal?! I got some help with my PhD thesis that way although I am sure it is in a very formal sort of passive voice and I would almost like to rewrite it all… almost.
Bob, only a minority of scientists are blogging or even reading science blogs regularly. We obviously want to change that. One step forward would be to understand how science blogging is perceived by the majority of scientists. A distraction, the future of scientific collaboration, a hobby by a minority?
Asa, it is erroneous to think of the passive voice as ‘formal’ and the active as ‘informal’. It doesn’t work like that. The active voice can be used formally or informally. It’s probably more accurate to think of the passive as ‘old-fashioned’ and the active as ‘modern’.
Martin and Bob — I think that many “real scientists” even look down on scientists who write News and Views articles for Nature (in my opinion, an extremely valuable activity both for the writer and the readers), and other “popular” material for people outside the field to read. So yes, blogging is beyond the pale in their eyes.
I don’t think you can generalise — and I’m sure you don’t mean to suggest that, either. For example, I see many science blogs that make me cringe and/or that seem to me to be a waste of the blogger’s time in various ways. Others are better – again in my view. Blogs that pose some thoughtful view or question (eg Female Science Professor) are both valuable in presenting questions about science and/or how it is performed, and broadly interesting to the world. Too many blogs are rants and/or superficial, and I don’t only refer to science ones, of course, but sadly I do include them.
Comment threads, incidentally, are particularly susceptible to “one-sentence opinionated statement without supporting data”.
Blogs could quite often do with being edited (by someone independent from the blogger). Then they’d be journals I suppose 😉
Jennifer> I need to clairfy since I understand what you mean and agree. I was trying to say two things at once and mixed them.
First> Personally, I tend to like the passive voice in science papers.
Second> I guess what I was trying to say here was that ‘formal writing in English’ might be easier than informal. This plus the fact that active voice makes it more ‘personal’ (which I guess is the main point of making it more interesting to read?) but maybe it is harder to write formal active than formal passive. At least this is true for me, being [scientificly] trained in passive formal rather than the other way around.
I just know that whenever I feel lost in the world of writing, the passive voice makes it all so much easier. Of course, it can make it harder to understand what actually goes on/is stated in the paper so I guess I shouldn’t fight against ‘active’ voice as much?! Maybe I need to be more modern then 😉
Asa — my main problem with the passive voice is that it does not (always) make it clear whether the writer did the action or had the thought being described, or if someone else did. So if you are using the passive voice when you write, my advice is to be super-careful that you aren’t introducing these types of ambiguity.
Using the active voice does not have this potential pitfall, of course, so it may be easier for the writer, particularly if writing in a language not his or her own original language.
As far as I can see, Asa, if you just go with ‘subject, verb, object’ and don’t use any slang, you are writing formally. Scientific papers have got a lot less stilted in recent years; just write simply and you will be fine.
Asa – Jennifer is right. Just keep things as simple as you can, and you should be fine. Formal English is often the best as it is clear, crisp, unambiguous – and can be very elegant. When I give my Confessions-of-a-Nature-editor talk, I always cite the works of Jane Austen as models of elegance and simplicity in prose fiction.
Jennifer, Maxine & Henry: since you all so well describe why one should/would prefer active voice instead of passive, I will take it to heart and try and change. It is of course not only a matter of what I think but sure enough, avanti!
(And one would be (more than) a little silly not listening to Editors of the trade…)
I just saw some of the earlier comments in this thread, so hope you will not mind me saying:
Henry– your comments about babies, oestrogen, etc. Wrong! When people on maternity leave appear with their babies, some females keep well clear, I have seen it myself. It is probably true that the presence of a baby in the office attracts those (1) personally interested in the subject for whatever reason; and (2) who want a break from the grind.
On scientists as bloggers or editors. The publishing industry as a whole is skewed towards the female, not just editors. (The pay is not as good as the financial sector.) The comment Jenny mentions, about female editors as failed scientists, was actually made to me by a (male, older) scientist so I have supporting evidence — unless it was the same scientist in Jenny’s and my case!
In various “careers” articles, I have seen figures purporting to show that scientific research itself is becoming increasingly dominated by women and ethnic minorites, as white males move into more remunerative areas, with more security and all of that. This may be true or may not be. I suppose the observations of an “old hand” such as myself count for something if not a great deal. It may sound obvious, but I’ve met plenty of good and poor editors and scientists, of both sexes in both cases. But most have been good. In my opinion.
Academic research is certainly not dominated by women in biology (a scientific discipline that is probably the most egalitarian). Most lab heads are men, most seminar speakers are men, most people asking questions at seminars are men, almost all full professors are men. The parity drops off after the postdoc level and gets worse and worse thereafter.
Maxine, as far as publishing is concerned, it was my impression that despite the rampant female rank and file, the majority of people in the upper levels (say Publisher rank and above) are male. Or has that just been unique to the few places I’ve been exposed to?
Sometimes you can run into referees, who write comments as though they have not gone through the manuscript once. Assuming that the referees do find time to go through the manuscript, one’s struggles to convince them to not to send it back for revisions begin when you start writing the manuscript. In the event, one tends to use such words as “tantalizingly” “astonishingly”, “contrary to”, “unexpectedly”, “novel”, “for the first time”, and may be in future “My finding is the eighth wonder”, “trust me you have never seen anything like this”, “you know I have cited a number of ariticles published from your group” etc. I guess referees are aware of this. Without the backing of solid proof from well planned and executed experiments, these are seen as attempts to mask the weaknesses and therefore helps the referees to easily spot the flaws. Revision is negotiation. Here is where folks feel that they need to read the referee’s mind. “How can I get this done without getting into the referee’s skin” is a primary thought.
In my opinion, one can start thinking of writing a manuscript by asking the following questions to oneself.
Do I truly have a significant finding that I can share with the scientific community?
Am I able to convince myself of my claims beyond any reasonable degree of doubt?
Do I have the capacity to fairly evaluate my results? If not, what is the opinion of my peers?
and last but not the least,
Did I do anything good for the general public or was it just a training to do the western blot?
Jennifer, I would rather say that the academic circle is populated with males. I got my Ph.D from a premier institution in India, and I noticed that at least 90% of the faculties were Males. In our department, there was one Female professor for about every 15 male professors. This was true in the whole institution. I have been to Delaware, New York, Virginia, Texas and California. I know that overwhelming majority of the faculties are males. When I was in college in India, I noticed that girls always scored very high grades compares to boys and yet failed to secure admissions in
top institutions where a graduate research aptitude test and interviews were conducted separately to spot the best. It seems to me that this is a global phenomenon. If so, why?
Nobody knows, Kolothuparambil. There are many theories. Some posit sexism from without; some posit reluctance from within. I can only be grateful that, within my lifetime, things have at least improved and seem set to continue. We much each of us battle injustice where we see it; no battle is too small.
Speaking of slipping interesting words into papers. My boss and I have introduced the word cheeseburgeresque into the medical literature and blamed it on Gary Larson.
Ha! Really?
You simply cannot drop that line without providing the reference.
Pretty please?
I’ll try to remember to supply a link once it’s online
doi:10.1016/j.smrv.2008.04.005
Ok that link doesn’t really work very well at all. Try Pub Med ID 18538598