At Hawley ’s suggestion, I am reposting this article example as a separate topic, redirected from this discussion.

Kawaguchi et al., “Biochemistry 2008, 47:5387-5395”http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/bichaw/2008/47/i19/abs/bi8002082.html.

I read this yesterday in a field whose toolset is fairly unfamiliar to me. So here’s an opportunity to see if a well-written paper can appeal outside of its discipline. (Spoiler: it can.)

This paper appeared as one of a tandem, the other, equally well-written but with a more genetic slant, appeared in May’s Journal of Biological Chemistry.

What I liked (I’m not having success in formatting my bullet list here):

1. Their clear, succinct explanations as they proceed through the results section of why they did certain controls and how it helped promote or eliminate certain hypotheses. This helped an intelligent but uninstructed neophyte in the techniques, like me, to understand their justification.

1. The authors made some new, testable hypotheses in their discussion (future directions). I like that a lot. Whether or not I would test them myself, it demonstrates a generosity of scientific spirit.

1. The figure legends are pretty much self-sufficient. You don’t have to flip between methods, results and the figure itself to understand what it’s about. Unless you want to know how many repetitions they did to calculate their error bars.

1. Overall, they say what they mean, and clearly.

What I didn’t like (but the former outweigh the latter by far):

1. The abstract, while clear and parsing well, is a little heavy on the -ize and -ility words.

1. The statistical quibbling above.