The relationship between writing, readability, peer review and reviewer IDs
Mickey Schafer
Wednesday, 25 March 2009 17:52 UTC
Another discussion on Friendfeed: Life Scientist room is going on regarding the peer review process and pros/cons of non-anonymous reviewing. This is not the first discussion there (and likely elsewhere) but something missing from all of these discussions is the lurking presence of someone who responds to writing itself — Nature mentions writing explicitly as the first question posed to reviewers (“Is the manuscript clearly written?”) and second question regarding whether it can be made more accessible to a larger audience. Further, in another section, Nature advises authors that it considers “readability” as one of its criteria in the editorial review process. And, in fact, when I am looking for examples of good scientific prose that is not “watered down science” but written with structural clarity, I can turn to virtually any Nature publication and get what I am looking for. This is not the case with all scientific publication.
So I have grown increasingly curious about this apparent disconnect the longer I navigate these discussions. The scientists themselves do not (as far as I can tell, with the possible exception of Michael Neilson, but even this essay on writing is not really science-specific) talk about being writers/writing/judging the quality of the writing itself as part of the peer review process. Yet the success of any particular paper is partially measured by the success of its prose. Do you as editors feel that writing-specific experts should be part of this open review process? Would writing-specific feedback be a useful part of peer review, and could writers/editors also create cultural capital for themselves by participating and becoming preferred “collaborators”? Finally, how do you as Nature editors address writing itself, especially as it applies to readability and accessibility?
Updated 25 March 2009 18:00 UTC
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Replies
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Great questions, Mickey, and you have put your finger on this “disconnect”.
At Nature and the other Nature journals, the disconnect is somewhat deliberate, in that we (the editors) realize that most papers have to be declined for space reasons, and we do not want to put authors (especially those for whom English is not their first language) to a lot of trouble if we can’t send their manuscript to peer review (most) or if we decline it after peer review (about half of peer-reviewed mss).
Our editors therefore send mss to peer-reviewers without worrying too much about format or writing style – they, and our reviewers, can recognise the message of a paper even if it is not well-put.If a paper is accepted (which for a Nature journal is after at least two rounds of review), our subeditors and copyeditors will help the author with the format and language aspects – they are all scientifically well-qualified and experienced in editing mss – they usually send authors an edited text for the author to review before the ms is typeset.
So to answer your question, for a journal like a Nature journal, we provide the “language editing” service for authors, free of charge, as part of our standard process of author service.
However, there are several reputable language editing services in existence, which authors are welcome to use before submitting their mss to any journal (Nature or otherwise). My own view is that use of such a service would not affect consideration at a Nature journal, as our editors are very good at discerning the message of a paper even if it is not well put.
Another aspect of our free author service is that we provide an editor’s summary of all papers in each issue, and also a press release of most of them, which is written by our press office and sent to many registered journalists. These two services help significantly to increase the reach of the paper itself, among journal readers (eg outside the field concerned) and the general public, respectively.
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Thanks, Maxine. That was a clear explanation of Nature’s take on things. I wonder, though, in an “open science” world where preprints were part of the normal process of garnering review, what part language editing would have. I spent the first 10 years of my teaching career working with non-native scientists, doctors, grad students (I often edited papers for the profs on my own phd committee!), and know that many of them were getting papers rejected for writing issues — it was tough to get complex ideas across in English. Perhaps in sciences that rely less on language to make their arguments and more on method, this isn’t such an issue (the physicists, engineers, and chemists were often successful sooner than those in psych, anthro, linguistics, ag). But I’d still argue that most any paper could use a language editors touch before whatever qualifies as “the final version”, supposing that such a beast exists in the science 2.0 utopia.
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Well, Nature is the journal I work for and the journal I know, and it is the topic of this forum, and I don’t speak for other publishers. But having said that, I do agree that not all journals have the same editorial staffing levels as the Nature journals, and I agree with you that people can benefit from language feedback, especially if they are having to submit in a language that isn’t their first language. Many scientists help their colleagues and friends in this way by helping them to revise and prepare their mss before publication, and as you say the preprint process helps too. As mentioned in my previous reply, there are various language editing advice resources, for example Sci Dev Net, and services which you pay for. On the main page of this forum there is a link to the Nature journals’ author and referees website, which contains some advice and links to some of these resources.
Preprints are part of the culture in some disciplines but not others; however I get the impression that feedback on preprints tends to be more technical than language based. That’s just an impression, though. There is a Nature Precedings forum elsewhere on Nature Network run by Hilary Spencer; perhaps she could say roughly how many of the online commenters over at Nature Precedings make suggestions about the language, and how many about technical matters to do with the scientific content and conclusions.
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