Quality of scientific writing considered in peer review?
Martin Fenner
Monday, 01 October 2007 05:53 UTC
I was wondering how much, if at all, the quality of the writing of a submitted paper is considered in the peer review process? I mean not the quality of the data or the arguments in the discussions but the writing style itself (language, grammar, etc.). In other words, will a nicely written paper with the same data be more likely be accepted?
-
Replies
Jump to resultsResults
-
The short answer is “no”. Clear and succinct writing helps, because editors and referees are very busy and so anything that helps them to absorb the message of the paper more easily is of benefit to the author. Authors are wise to pay particular attention to the summary or abstract paragraph, as that is what will “sell” the paper initially to the referee or editor. The Nature guide to authors has a step-by-step guide to writing a clear first paragraph here.
However, Nature journals would certainly not decline a paper on the grounds that it isn’t well written.
All papers go through two or more rounds of review, a process which includes advice from editors and peer-reviewers on presentation and writing style. (We provide writing advice on our Author and Reviewers’ website, and link there to some useful translation and writing-advice sites, for those authors for whom English isn’t their first language).
After a paper is accepted for publication, it is subedited (sometimes called copyedited): the subeditor will send the author an edited version of the accepted manuscript (before it is typeset) and assist him or her to present the arguments in the most logical and succinct manner, if the paper isn’t well written at the time of acceptance. This is part of the service which we are delighted to offer to authors. -
I confidently say that a nicely written paper is far more likely to be considered for publication in the peer review process.
Maxine explains Nature’s efforts to help authors for whom English isn’t their first language.
I’m not convinced. -
I agree with Edoardo that it is hard for those for whom English isn’t a first language. We do advise you to ask a native English speaker in your group or working in the same area to look through your paper for you before submitting, which will help a lot to achieve clarity in an unfamiliar language. Focusing on the abstract/summary paragraph, as I mentioned above, is well worth it and not hard to get advice on a short piece of text. But I agree, it is difficult to write precisely in a language that isn’t your own.
To help in a general sense, we provide information about our publishing process in eight languages here, which we hope makes our process as transparent as possible. And as I mentioned above, our writing guide links to various translation and advice sites, including the very good one at SciDev.net.
Eduardo, what else do you think a journal like Nature can do to help? -
Apologies, Edoardo, I spelt your name wrong in my last sentence above.
-
Maxine,
thank you very much for the detailed explanation. I have difficulties in deciding on my position in this issue. On one hand it should be the data and arguments that matter in a paper. And scientists that speak English as a second language (I’m German) shouldn’t be at a disadvantage.
On the other hand, most people probably agree that the quality of scientific writing could be improved. One main reason for this is the trend to more and more subdisciplines with their own language, as Jonathan Knight wrote in this Nature news feature. Tim Albert argues in a commentary in Medical Education that communication is no longer the main reason for publication. A scientific paper is rather published to value the work of the research team and to be associated with new knowledge.
Books and articles about scientific writing, writing classes and professional copy-editing services all can help with the quality of the writing, but why bother? Everybody loves good scientific writing, but we need real incentives to put an extra effort into this.
-
I think the point is that although the quality of the writing doesn’t formally matter, at the margin, an author who describes their findings coherently and compellingly is likely to fare better than someone who doesn’t. This is an effect that I’m sure editors try hard to overcome, but in the real world its impossible to eliminate it altogether.
It’s also worth pointing out that high-quality journals like Nature put a great deal of effort into making those papers they do accept as comprehensible as possible. This is obviously to ensure that as many people as possible can appreciate the implications of the findings, which is ultimately the most important reason for promoting clear writing.
(Disclaimer: Though I work for Nature, I’m not an editor.)
-
I also work for Nature and am currently not an editor, but prior to working here I was an editor for another scientific publisher and for the same academic publisher I also used to work as a copy-editor.
Whilst working as a copy-editor, on both books and journals, I received only manuscripts that had been accepted for publication. I encountered sections in some of these manuscripts that were incomprehensible. Clearly the writing had not been a factor when deciding on publication, however the time required to render the work into a form that was readable often created a serious delay in the publication of the work.
I can only imagine that had the language been worse the scientific argument may have been lost, and the paper rejected due to a misunderstanding.
In my time as an editor (again not for Nature) we sometimes debated whether we should instruct our reviewers to reject based on language. We never did, but I do know that the papers that were harder to read were often the ones that took longer to come back from the reviewing process.
-
The “real incentive” is getting your paper published in a good journal. Most people don’t have a paper that would be publishable in a top journal like Nature all that often in their lives, and the competition is fierce. That is, I would think, a real incentive to present the work as clearly as possible. It does not have to be a work of literature, just clear and as concise as is consistent with clarity.
-
Strangely, I am “anonymous” in my reply immediately above — but it is me, Maxine.
-
Papers in Nature are judged on novelty – does the finding represent a truly fundamental advance in knowledge, or just an elaboration on what we knew yesterday? But no advance, however surprising, will be published if the paper is unintelligible.
Nature publishes in English – as an editor of Nature I make no apologies for that. That’s the way it is, and always has been since 1869. But the English doesn’t have to be literary and elegant – it is enough for it to be plain, simple and clear.
In 1996 I was lucky enough to have spent a sabbatical at the University of California, Los Angeles, where I taught a graduate seminar course on science publication. I emphasized that good writing was the last bastion of accessibility. Sadly, many people still think that good communication is a lesser skill than being able to use their scientific equipment. My response is always this – any fool can learn to press buttons or read an instruction manual, but good writing takes time to master, and is the most important skill you can learn.
I should add, here, that the very best papers I havce seen, in terms of accessibility, have been written by people whose first language was not English. The least intelligible papers come from Americans who think they have a better mastery of English than they do (so shoot me…)
Results
-
