scientific writing

How not to do peer review

Manu Saunders11 Comments

Academia may be unique among careers in its lack of standardised processes or training for so many of the common activities that are essential to being an academic. Instead, new researchers have to bumble blindfolded through the dark room of early career researchhood to work out how to literally do the academic parts of their job. Sometimes we’re lucky to have a supervisor, colleague, or mentor who might guide us to a door (but it may not always be the right door).

Publishing and peer review are part of this bumbling process. Publishing our research in peer-reviewed literature is a key part of our job description, to share knowledge with the discipline and beyond.

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Read my Methods

Manu Saunders3 Comments

A scientific paper follows the classic literary plot structure. Each section follows in sequence from the previous sections, so that no individual section (with the exception of the Introduction) can be fully understood without having read the previous ones. If you pick up a novel and read the last page first, you might find out whether Jack dies, but you won’t have any idea who killed him and why. Those details are important.

In terms of understanding the Results and Discussion sections of a paper, the Methods section is critical. Results should never be read as a standalone text. The only way you, the reader, can judge if my results are valid and meaningful is if you know how I collected and analysed the data.

The sexy summary sentence in an empirical paper’s abstract doesn’t necessarily apply to everywhere and everything – there’s a context. Which is why journals that hide the Methods at the end of the paper, or in supplementary material, are doing Science a huge disfavour. Continue reading →

The benefits of pre-submission peer review

Manu Saunders4 Comments

I’ve noticed that acknowledgements sections in papers published before the 2000s usually thank people who read and commented on the paper before it was published. Yet recently-published papers are more likely to thank funding bodies or data collectors than peer reviewers. Why is this?

park 1931
Park (1931) Ecology 12:188-207

Solomon 1949
Solomon (1949) Journal of Animal Ecology 18:1-35

Lloyd 1987
Lloyd (1987) Functional Ecology 1: 83-89

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Insect Pollinators or Pollinator Insects?

Manu Saunders6 Comments

Recently, a reviewer of one of my manuscripts requested that I change the term “pollinator insects” to “insect pollinators” throughout the manuscript, because the latter was the usual term found in the literature.

I’ve nearly always used “pollinator insects” in my publications, partly from habit because one of my PhD supervisors once told me that was correct usage, and partly because “insect pollinators” sounded ambiguous to me – was I talking about insects that pollinate things, or about other organisms that pollinate insects? But this was the first time I had been specifically requested to change my phrasing to conform to apparently common usage.

The reviewer is right. Search any journal database or linguistic corpora, and you will get many more hits for “insect pollinators” than you will for “pollinator insects”. Usage of “insect pollinators” also goes back further than the alternative (Scopus results: 1933 for “IP” and 1991 for “PI”). Even the reliable source Google Trends doesn’t register any interest at all for “pollinator insects”!

Yet grammatically, both terms are correct and choosing one would depend on how you were using it. Continue reading →

To be or not to be … Scientist or Writer?

Manu SaundersLeave a comment

I have just had the opportunity to attend the Publishing With Impact workshop, facilitated by Camilla Myers from CSIRO Publishing. Without any overstatement, it was the most enjoyable and helpful workshop I have ever attended. Although the ultimate success of a workshop is purely context-specific – dependent on the dynamics of the participants and the facilitator as well as the information involved – the structure of this workshop is invaluable for any academic who struggles with either writing or the publishing puzzle … and inspiring for any who don’t!

I am currently in the final scenes of my PhD saga, in which I have to “write” The Unwritten. Ironically, this has always been the part of my PhD I was most looking forward to. I have been writing “creatively” since high school and my first degree and pre-enviro science work history were all about Writing and using English as a creative tool (rather than an arduous accessory to life!). So, suffice to say, I thought I was a pretty good wordsmith when I dove naïvely into the world of Science. Continue reading →