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?
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While I’m here, I’d like to refer to Martin Fenner’s related (but separate) point that many scientists tend to use their own jargon, accessible to their immediate colleagues but not to the world at large. Now, what I am about to say is controversial – but I don’t care. Papers in Nature should ideally be accessible to all Nature readers, not to those in some disciplines (parts of molecular cell biology are the worst offenders) who think it is their right to publish in general-interest journals while making no effort at all to be accessible. For them publication is entirely self-serving. Editors are here to stop that (hopefully). Goodness, I have some stories that would make your hair curl… but they’d probably be actionable.
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Thank you, Henry. I highly recommend Henry’s anecdote on the subject of titles, which he relates at his Network blog End of the Pier Show.
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I’m going to weigh in on this question. The editors at Nature Immunology have taken the tact to perform line-by-line editing of manuscripts that have passed the peer review process but have not yet been accepted for publication. We do this editing precisely for the reasons Timo suggested, to enhance the readibility and accessibility of the articles for a larger segment of our research community. It’s a win-win situation for the authors and the journal. After all, the more difficult it is to slog one’s way through the reader, the more likely it will be that a reader will put the paper down and not pick it up again, and hence perhaps less likely to be cited in a future publication. We try not to let this issue of writing quality influence the initial stages of manuscript evaluation (that is, whether to send it out to peer review).
If the manuscript is unclear, however, it is much more likely that referees too might ‘miss the point’ presented by the authors. Many times we have seen authors respond to reviewers critiques by stating that ‘the referees failed to carefully read the paper’ because the data in question was there. Yet, if the same comment is made by multiple referees, the question is whether the point is presently clearly enough by providing sufficient context or by prioritizing the data shown to avoid dilution of the main message.
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I would say that depends. On the one hand papers with better grammatical style can be easy to read for people with English like second language (like me). On the other hand, try to do a paper in molecular Biology that is accessible for all population demands time and personnel, and in many occasions this is not available. The papers have their readers and most of these can read them even without points and commas.
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Adalberto – if these papers have their readers who can understand them, no matter what, then these papers belong in a specialist journal and not in Nature. But that’s just my view.
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Nature does publish highly specialist manuscripts, it is true. Cell and molecular biology, immunology and genetics, to name but a few disciplines, have many abbreviations and other shorthands to describe complex processes. So, Alberto, you are right to say that these papers present special challenges to the author or editor who is trying to make them accessible to a wide readership.
The advice I mentioned above and on the Nature website assists authors to make the “abstract” of their paper clear to a more general readership (scientists in other disciplines). I think that any paper, however technical and complex, can have a comprehensible abstract that describes its message in a transparent way to people outside the discipline. But often, the text itself is much too specialist for most nonspecialists to understand. At Nature, we are aware of this, and while our editors and subeditors do a lot to improve the clarity of text, we also accept that some fields just are highly technical.
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I understand that the editors and subeditors of Nature do a good job to improve the readability of a paper once it is accepted. For specialty journals with smaller circulations this might not be possible. I like the idea by John Ludbrook in his article Writing Intelligible English Prose for Biomedical Journals. He suggests that universities and other institutions should employ copy editors that help their researchers in manuscript writing. Similar to biostatistics, scientific writing is difficult without formal training and just too important.
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Yes, quite a few institutions or labs employ people to help with manuscript writing and presentation. Several of them, particularly in the USA, run courses on writing and publishing papers for their staff and students. It is also clear from what authors tell us when they submit their mss to Nature that they do get plenty of “informal” help, from others in their group who are more experienced, or from people in the same discipline at other institutions, or others. (The SciDev.net website, linked in the NPG author and reviewer advice URL I provided earlier in this thread, is particularly useful in this type of advice, as this site is aimed at scientists in developing countries who don’t necessarily have ready access to these kinds of services, formal or informal.)
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I would like to congratulate all of this forum. It was of great help to me.
I take this opportunity to report that I am Brazilian and I have little inlgesa domain of language, but I am trying to share knowledge with other scientists.
With friendly greetings from BRAZIL -
Another NPG editor, Ai Lin Chun, who works for Nature Nanotechnology, has just started posting writing tips in her Nature Nanotechnology group. She’ll be putting up more tips, so check it out.
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