Why are so many scientific articles difficult to read?
Linda Cooper
Wednesday, 26 March 2008 20:07 UTC
Does the fact that so few papers have made it onto the roster of “good” papers suggest that most papers are obscure and poorly written?
Over the years, I’ve searched through various journals and read several hundred papers looking for examples of well-written manuscripts. While examples of poorly written texts abound, clearly written papers are surprisingly few in number.
Perhaps, as has been suggested earlier, it will be more helpful and relevant to turn our attention to why scientific articles are so inaccessible, so poorly written.
Linda
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I think it would be helpful, Linda, were you to break down those factors which, in your opinion, constitutes poor writing in scientific papers…
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Hi Linda:
My opinion is that so few papers have made it onto the roster of “good” papers because in organizing our time, finding them has not been as high priority as other activities.
A suggestion or two per person should already make a nice start from which we could perhaps extract some common elements. Sticking to one’s own discipline is fine; maybe we will learn what makes a paper universal and not subject to the dreaded “better suited to a more specialist journal”.
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Good idea. Linda has already written some useful posts on her blog Time for a change to this end (including examples), for example effective and not so effective introductory sentences of the abstract ; why the active voice, useful transitions, and clear subjects help readers ; and small changes that work for writer and reader . There are more—all with examples and good comment discussion threads. Somehow we need to integrate Linda’s blog with this forum – the blog for the “how to write” discussion and the forum for the good papers—which I agree, it would be nice to have more of, and even though I am on holiday at the moment I shall try to find some time to look for some to post.
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I like the idea of posting examples of good scientific writing. I have only recently started to actively look out for these papers and find it a difficult and time-consuming task.
What strategies can be used to find well-written papers, especially if you are not an editor? I have started to earmark the well-written papers I’m reading, but that strategy takes time. I could also start to look more closely – at least title and abstract – at papers unrelated to my scientific interests in new issues of general science journals such as Nature, Science or PNAS. If I understand the abstract of a physics or neuroscience paper, the writing is probably good.
Maybe we should post not only examples of good papers, but also include parts of papers that we think were nicely written. This could mean good titles, clear figures and tables, a good discussion, etc.
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Maybe one way to do it would be to create a Connotea tag, eg “well-written paper” (I think the adjective “good” is ambiguous, as you can have a good but not well-written paper).
Then everyone who wants to nominate a paper just has to add it to the Connotea group using that tag. The tag and its URL can be posted as a noticeboard entry once set up, for info to group members.
Adding a Connotea bookmark takes seconds, and the Connotea note function will allow you to write (briefly) what you liked about the writing style.
Although this won’t get around access to the whole paper for people who don’t have site licences or subscriptions to the journals concerned, abstracts at least are free. -
Oh grief. I guess that means I have to get to grips with Connotea…
;)
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Well I am sure it is a doddle if I can do it—and certainly compared with all that SQV5 stuff people have been writing about in respoinse to Jennifer Rohn’s post on using excel spreadsheets to analyse gene screens – which sounds to me like sending in the Roman legions to count ‘em up….
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I agree with Martin that it’s probably easier to identify elements of a paper that we think work well – rather than posting full papers. Titles may be a good place to begin (and by the way, I really like titles that identify the author’s important finding or contribution). Should we start there?
And will you please tell me how to create a Connotea tag?
Thanks,
Linda -
A part from reader’s culture, of course, some scientific papers are poorly written text, so I think, since the authors are not thinking as readers do, when reading the article. I mean, the author of a scientific paper, especially if really technical, original, specialized, has to illustrate firstly all fundamental knowledge necessary to understand the illustrated argument, avoiding too specialized explanations. Obviously, due to space reasons, the author may referr to his previous articles, whose text give necessary information.
In any case, this is my behaviour… which is well functioning since half a century. -
Linda: I’ve created Connotea tags “well written paper” and “good paper journal club”.
Connotea is here, so you need to create an account and set up a bookmarklet (Browser button “add to connotea”)—the site should automatically take you through that but the instructions are here. It just takes a minute.
Once you have the “add to connotea” bookmarklet, you just click on it any time you want to add that article whose webpage you are on to Connotea. You will be prompted to tag the article, so you add our tag “well written paper” and/or “good paper journal club” (you need to keep the quotes round the tag).
You can add any other tags you want to as well—Connotea automatically keeps you a list of all the tags you’ve created. You can click on any tag, or search everyone’s library using any tag, and you’ll find all entries with that tag.
Connotea is very easy to use (apologies if I have not made it sound so!) and has good instructions, but let me know if anything isn’t clear.
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