Scientific Writing Easy When You Know How Scientific Writing Easy When You Know How

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 v 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 vi 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 (www 1) 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 x Introduction tried not to be pedantic about what is right and what is wrong in pure linguistic or grammatical rules but rather to explain the rules that work best when presenting the results of scientific studies. We hope that novice writers will find this book of help to start them on a meaningful path to publishing their research, and that seasoned scientists will find some new tips to help them refine their writing skills. xi Acknowledgements We extend our thanks to the researchers who were noble enough to allow us to use their draft sentences in our examples. None of us writes perfectly to begin with or expects to see our first efforts displayed publicly. We are extremely grateful to the many people with whom we have worked and learnt from and we hope that they, in turn, receive satisfaction from helping others to become better writers. xii Foreword Editors need authors more than authors need editors. All authors and editors should remember this. Authors may be prone to despair and editors to arrogance, but authors are more important than editors. I was reminded of this eternal truth, which all editors forget, as I lectured yesterday in Calabar, Nigeria, on how to get published. I talked of the difficulty of writing and described the BMJ’s system for triaging the 6000 studies submitted to us a year. It’s nothing short of brutal. After the talk one of the audience asked: “What I want to know is what can you do for us?” Cheers went round the room.

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