Consensus capitalizations of scientific words
Eva Amsen
Monday, 20 October 2008 19:02 UTC
I figured editors would know this:
Is there a definitive resource for looking up the spelling and capitalization and hyphenation of scientific words?
I used MESH to find the proper spelling of gene and protein names, but I’m now trying to find out if it’s “Western blot” or “western blot” or “Western Blot” and find that all three are in use. Southern was a name, but what is the rule for Northern and Western?
Is there an OED of scientific language or something equally useful?
Updated 20 October 2008 20:23 UTC
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No, there isn’t any definitive resource. For example, Americans like to spell things the American way, and British people the English way.
Most journals or insitutions or sites have a house style, eg Nature uses the OED (online) and has a dense style manual with rules for capitalisations and so on. Moon, for example, has a captial M if it is the Earth’s Moon, but lower case if it is another planet’s. Similary Galaxy (ours) and galaxy (others).
Once Google came along a lot of the problems of variant spellings for the same word went away, as Google is very forgiving.However, synonyms are certainly an issue in matters of nomenclature, as are hyphens.
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Bah. I’ll just have to pick a capitalization then, I guess. I’m nitpicking my own thesis, that’s why I’m asking. I was annoyed by my own inconsistencies (LAMP1 or LAMP-1, Erk or ERK, etc.) and, even though none of the committee members has picked up on the crazy spelling yet, I want it to be perfect.
I’m also currently TA-ing a course in scientific writing (where third year Biology students learn how to write like a scientist), so I’m suddenly primed to pick up all kinds of little things.
It would have been so nice if there was one central place to look things up. For me, for them, for everyone.“Americans like to spell things the American way, and British people the English way.”
And Canadians can’t decide and use -ize and
-our. Madness. -
Insofar as those types of entity are concerned, there are international nomenclature committees that issue commuiques about agreed abbreviations: these pronouncements are findable (eg via web searches or relevant scientific societies), and also on various databases there are links to style conventions. If there doesn’t seem to be any agreed style, eg a hyphen in a chemical’s abbreviation, then the main thing is to stick to the same style consistently in your thesis. Much easier these days than when I wrote mine in prehistoric times ;-) Good luck.
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Hey Eva – one thing I do when I’m stuck for the ‘definitive answer’ in the types of resources mentioned by Maxine (including our own set of ‘very dense style guidelines’ – we also have something called ’Rose’s Bible’, written up by a frustrated copy editor a while ago, which has an astounding amount of information on ‘how we do things’ in it).. I google it. In any discipline, there usually seems to be a prevalent convention on how to spell/write certain things. A good example is Na+/K+-ATPase: this also comes as Na+-K+-ATPase and Na+,K+-ATPase. Personally, I go for the Na+/K+.., as it seems the most sensible solution (avoid too many hyphens, weird commas, etc.). The fun thing is when you find a ‘prevalent convention’ that doesn’t make sense to anyone outside of that discipline! In that case, you just sigh and go with it.
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p.s. it just occurred to me that I should add.. I am not a Nature editor. Anyway, I looked up our ‘bible’ on the blots – there’s been some history:
Southern blotting: capital ‘S’. Chromatographic technique for analyzing DNA restriction fragments. Named after E. M. Southern. The similar techniques, Northern and Western blottings are named by analogy, not after their inventors; hence northern blot (lowercase), western blot (lowercase),
and Southern blot (uppercase) are the technically correct terms. However, almost no one else out there in the world of science knows this, so if authors capitalize ‘northern’ and ‘western’ as well – and do it consistently – we do not bother to change this.Fun!
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Thanks, Steffi!
I went with lowercase for western blot in the end. It just made the most sense. =) -
And I still think there should be one centralized rulebook for how to do things in molecular biology, for those wordsthat are not in regular dictionaries or in IUPAC rules or MESH.
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I agree. I suspect it would be an ever-expanding gigantic opus, though :) ..Hey, maybe such a resource could be started with web 2.0 tools – if they don’t go away before that?
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Just to give the editorial view: you are correct that only Southern should be capitalized, since it is a name; the others should indeed be lower case.
Sadly there are precious few resources out there for this sort of thing – hence most journals have in-house style guides. The Oxford Dictionary of Molecular Biology is probably as good as it gets.
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I will weigh in here as an Nature Immunology editor for the particular examples discussed above for the various blotting techniques. You are right in that the DNA blotting and hybridization technique is named for the developer of this process, E.M. Southern. Laboratory jargon has adopted various points of the compass for other blotting experiments such as northerns, westerns, and so on. However, much more precise terms can be used to describe these techniques and make these intelligible to even those not in a particular biological research area, and so a northern is “RNA hybridization” and western is “immunoblot”. We prefer to use these more precise terms.
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