I think it would be useful to have the occasional item looking at resources for science writers.

I’ve just reviewed the New Oxford Dictionary for Science Writers and Editors it’s available already from Amazon.co.uk and from May 2009 from Amazon.com

The subtitle is ‘the essential A-Z style guide for scientists’, and it does resemble a very long newspaper style guide, telling you not only how to spell those messy scientific terms, but also what is and isn’t acceptable to use.

It’s a fairly compact book at 18cm x 12, not exactly pocket-sized, but portable enough. Inevitably it’s rather dominated by chemical names and biological terms, but there’s stuff to interest the general science writer too. For example, we’re told (though not why) to use Oersted for the name of the Danish physicist, not Ørsted. And sealion is one word, apparently. Rather disappointingly, it doesn’t give pronunciations.

These days I tend to use the OED online, and would prefer this book in electronic form too (in fact it ought to be incorporated into the electronic OED as a matter of course – I don’t know if it is).

It’s a useful tool to have around a magazine or newspaper office, but I’m not sure if it’s worth individual writers lashing out on it.