Author summary or clearly written article?
Maxine Clarke
Sunday, 16 March 2008 17:10 UTC
Linda Cooper writes at her Time for a Change blog about the journal Science’s recent experiment in which authors wrote a one-page initial summary to explain the paper to a wide audience. Linda argues that clearer writing of the paper itself serves a better purpose. What are the views of the scientists in Nature Network about ease of comprehension of papers outside their own micro-discipline?
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Replies
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I work across several disciplines, so I’m use to not understanding the details. Generally, it’s not too difficult to work out the message of papers in a reasonably close discipline.
The problem is if it’s about something technical, e.g. if it gets heavily into maths or molecular biology (I sometimes read through the paper titles in Nature and Science simply to amuse myself with their incomprehensibility).
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Ah, titles. That endless juggling act between something readers can understand and the authors’ understandable desire to maximise keywords for A&I (abstracting and indexing) services.
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Shortly after beginning my first job in a research centre, I developed a technique for weeding out articles that I felt were not worth my time: If the title is more than a line and a half long, skip it.
Abstracting and indexing aside, if an author can’t summarise the point of their writing, how can I expect them to make a coherant argument, one worth reading?
I am currently working closely with a Ph.D. student who has the opinion that he is writing for people in his field and therefore needs not clarify for laymen. I am working very hard at convincing him otherwise; not only am I of the opinion that any writing is useless if few if any people can comprehend it, but I am familiar with the material and see no reason that people shouldn’t be able to understand it outside of the tiny niche (single other author?) for which he had previously been writing.
This material involves some fairly heavy immunology, but I was able to explain it to someone in organic chemistry, so why is it so difficult for virologists to understand neurology? For biochemists to understand molecular biology? I have some ideas, but I think they may be better placed in direct response to Linda Cooper’s blog.
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