Replies

• 1

  Joerg Heber

  24 October 2008 | 12:01

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  Hi John

  here are a few from Nature Materials that I like:

  John Rogers et al. on flexible solar cells

  Albert Fert et al. on multiferroic tunnel junctions (this one has a slight overuse of acronyms though)

  Claire Gmachl et al. on negative refraction in semiconductors

  But note – these papers were stuck in my mind for the great science they contain. So this would be the first ingredient, essential to our decision as editors! There are also badly written papers we published regardless of style because of the science they contain. You don’t need to be Shakespeare.

  My advice would be to seek out paper in your field that were published in high-profile journals, and take a look at these.

  Obviously, in the introduction you need to make the state of the field clear in a few sentences, and explain the advance you make, and why this is important for a broad readership.

  Your results should of course be presented clearly and compellingly. Finally, conclude with an outlook on the impact this work might have (no hype!).

  Hope that helps.

  Joerg

• 2

  Leslie Sage

  24 October 2008 | 12:24

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  Very good physics is essential, as Joerg said. A well written paper with mediocre results will never be a good paper.

  There are four key elements:
  1) establish a context within which the work is very important — tell people why they should care about the topic.
  2) explain the big problems in the field
  3) tell people what you have done
  4) link the results back to the problems and context in a way that convinces readers you have made significant progress towards the solution of one or more of the big problems.

  Another important consideration is to remember that the purpose of a scientific paper is to communicate results efficiently. It is not to impress other people with how smart you are — too many papers are written with that objective.

  Finally, results should be conveyed in clear, straightforward and unambiguous terms. There are some fields (high T_c prominent amongst them) where people actively hide the implications of their results — that is not good science.

  Leslie Sage
  Senior Editor, Physical Sciences
  Nature

• 3

  Maxine Clarke

  24 October 2008 | 16:30

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  Thanks, Leslie and Joerg. Leslie has written an article about writing a paper, which is freely available here.

• 4

  John Jost

  24 October 2008 | 18:54

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  Thank you everyone for your lengthy responses. I found them and the links very helpful.

  One additional question I had was regarding how important it is to justify significance of one’s work to people outside your field (for me it would be physics). Obviously it would be nice to be able justify to someone in biology why my physics work is interesting, but that does not seem to be the norm for how things are done. We often seem to remark around our lunch table at the lab that it is rare for us looking at a biology article in Nature or Science to be able to see the interest, let alone understand the content. To be fair I am guessing the biologists probably say the same thing about the physics articles. I guess, I am trying to figure out how much effort to put into making our paper appeal to a general audience.

  Thanks for your time,
  John