Correspondence: Better writing and more space needed online
Martin Fenner
Thursday, 04 September 2008 09:49 UTC
Linda Cooper wrote a letter with the above title in this week’s Nature1. The title says it all. Papers in online-only journals are often unnecessary short. She also makes the point that the inflation of online supplementary material makes it more difficult to read a paper, especially when reading the print version.
My question would be whether longer papers are on average really easier to read. I think that the shorter format requires the author to be more careful with the language of every single sentence and can sometimes actually improve the writing.
1 Cooper L. Better writing and more space needed online. doi:10.1038/455026a
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Good that She wrote about this. I have found that some papers published in science and nature are really difficult to read due to limited space for detailed explanation.
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Our publisher has kindly agreed to make this Correspondence article free to access.
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She has a point indeed; I often wonder why the supplementary material in
that other journal I will most probably never get published inScience often looks like an MS-Word draft. -
I recently submitted a paper to a RSC journal and (for the first time) I include some supplementary material. These were images that illustrated how we measured a particular piece of data that was used as a limiting case in our analysis. If they had been in the paper they would have occupied a complete page and upset the visual balance of the article (i.e. they would have made this part of the paper appear too important). However, it was useful to be able to include them to illustrate the method. In the good old days of print only journals, they would have been in an appendix. Surely the role of supplementary online information is to take the place of appendices
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Yes, Brian, I think so, if you include additional methodological details, protocols, figures and so on as well as traditional appendix material. Also data in various forms if there isn’t an appropriate external database; and movies/audio and other formats that don’t work in print. Where I slightly part company with it (Supplemental Information) is when it is used lazily to throw in extra discussion, a few additional figures and so on. This makes the main message of the paper harder to absorb, especially if you are in a slightly or even completely different discipline.
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I’m glad that Linda ended her letter with a plea for better quality writing because her earlier argument that online publishing could offer ‘limitless space’ could have been construed by some as an invitation to dump rubbish in public places.
The present trend can be irksome as Martin and Maxine have pointed out but I wonder if it is a passing phase that will soon be eclipsed by technology. How long will it be before I can peruse the literature on the bus using a wireless eBook reader that is permanently and speedily connected to the internet?
Even then of course, there will be the problem of generating a format of Supp. Info. that integrates well with the main article. But isn’t that just a bit of html?
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I do like the traditional paper format and very much hope it doesn’t become extinct in the age of online publishing. A good paper has a beginning, a middle part and an end. Wiki entries and online databases are very good for many things, but because of their non-linear and often changing nature and the (sometimes) problems with authorship attribution I see them as supplementary to the traditional paper and not a replacement.
Stephen, this future is closer than we think. I already use an iPhone to read (some of the)science blog I subscribed to in the subway. But reading the printout of interesting papers is probably still a very common activity of many commuting scientists including myself.
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Martin, I too still prefer to read printed pdfs. Even though I’m a big fan of Papers for organising them on my laptop (and it was a pleasure to bump briefly into Alexander Griekspoor at the recent Sciblog conference), it’s not quite there in terms of offering a convenient reading experience. This is partly because my commute doesn’t often provide me with the chance to open up my computer – even if I’m sitting, there’s not enough space (must get an eee PC…).
Hence the desire for an easy-to-read device that’s always online – and allows me to annotate in the margin. That said, I will only be interested in reading quality material on it.
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I’m often struck in these conversations, eg here and at the Science blogging conference, how the web 2.0 conversation is echoing the longstanding issue of “two types of reader” – which plagued Nature editors’ brains before the web was invented a lot more than it does now . Type 1 readers are the fellow specialists who mainly want access to the data, as much of them as possible. They aren’t bothered by the structure of the paper, indeed they could just do without it except as a log for the data – the “paper as a unit which is published in a journal and describes a piece of work” is the opposite of their desire. Type 2 is everyone else, who likes what Martin says: a beginning, middle and end; and what Linda says: a well-written (but not necessarily long) story, possibly without any data at all: this type of reader wants to trust that the story is backed up by reliable data, but they don’t actually want or have time to wade through it.
As things stand, there seems to be a need for both. Type 1s want a highly structured, interconnected and giant database. Type2s mainly want the ideas and the “story” the data tell.
Am I being too nerdish here? Is it possible for online supplemental information (including links to external online databases) to be all things to all type 1s and type 2s? -
Martin, responding to your earlier comment: Unfortunately, short articles are rarely crafted with care. Instead, they are difficult to read because writers feel that can (or must) make assumptions about what readers know (after all, there’s so little space to explain important information), use strings of terms to compensate for limited word counts (“post operative cognitive dysfunction is common in elderly patients. . .” – is shorter, to be sure, than “frequently, elderly patients experience cognitive dysfunction following surgery…” but it’s also more difficult for readers to process quickly), use specialized jargon rather than explaining a significant term – (again because of space limitations), and omit transitional phrases that ease the reading process. Once again, I’d like to say that close and careful editing is an important part of the solution; when authors apply a handful of straightforward editing techniques to their articles – and remember that they have to write for both non-specialist and specialist readers – then their writing improves greatly. Of course, scientists also need to know that good, precise, clear writing takes a tremendous amount of time and energy. (There are some who say that researchers should devote as much time to writing up their papers as it takes to complete a study!) Since good writing skills are fundamental to communicating science, I wonder why so few scientists receive training in how to write clearly about their research.
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