One of the most important papers for science communication (and it’s from 2000!)

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captions, figure legends, science communication, writing

Like many academics, I spend a fair bit of time reviewing other people’s work.  Whether this is manuscripts from collaborators or students, submitted articles from journals, or grant applications, there are few weeks in the year where I don’t spend some time thinking about what suggestions I can make to authors so they can improve their writing, their science, and their science communication.

What’s the first thing you do when you read a paper? Chances are, you read over the title, perhaps the author(s’) name(s), and the abstract.  After that, you probably flip to to figures and tables, since they’re likely to give you an indication of the kind of analysis, and a glimpse of the results.

But if there’s one constant in all the reviewing I do, it’s pointing out that the figure and table legends most of us use in scientific papers are terrible, awful, machinations of verbiage.  This is something I only really became aware of during my PhD when a committee member pointed out what has got to be the single paper I point authors to in my reviews:

Kroodsma, D.E. 2000. A quick fix for figure legends and table headings. Auk, 117: 1081-1083.

More often than not, we just describe the contents of the table or figure.  Anyone can see that you’re reporting the length of eggs, or the annual survival estimates, or frequency of death by hippopotamus over time.  “So what?” asks the reader. “What is the author trying to tell me here?”

Use table and figure legends to convey the message you want, not just describe the contents.

Table 2 in Don Kroodsma’s paper gives wonderful examples of how to do this.  For example:

• Descriptive: “Relationship between territory size and distance from roads for 21 Ovenbird territories …. “
• Informative: “Territory size of 21 Ovenbirds decreases with distance from roads…”

In the descriptive (and published) caption, we’re told there’s a relationship, and not much else.  By revising the caption to contain the message, we get what the relationship is, and the take home message (i.e., why the figure or table was included in the first place).  If you’re giving an oral or poster presentation, you don’t just point to a graph on your poster or the projector screen and say “And this shows the relationship between the number of people hailing a cab, and those who have attended at least one bat mitzvah“.  Are cab-hailers more or less likely to have attended bat mitzvahs? Are people who go to bat mitzvahs more or less likely to hail a cab? Sure, in this example it’s obvious, but that’s not always the case.

Science communication is not just about communicating science to the general public, but to the scientific community as well.  I’ve argued before that the way we write affects how well people understand it. Figure and table captions are no different.

Characteristics of roads in Saskatchewan. | Roads in Saskatchewan tend to be straight and flat.

More abstract ideas: “AudioSlides”

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abstract, audio, publishing

I’ve discussed various elements of author-generated media to accompany papers (like graphical abstracts, or even video summaries).  Now, Elsevier has started rolling out “AudioSlides” –

AudioSlides are short, webcast-style presentations that are shown next to the online article on ScienceDirect. This format gives authors the opportunity to summarize their research in their own words, helping readers to quickly understand what a paper is about and appreciate its relevance

Needless to say, my main arguments for (and against) video abstracts remain.  Any of these other science communication tools should be produced as professionally (if not more so) than the text of the manuscript.  Some university communications departments might be able to help, but if authors choose to go it alone, invest in a good mic, use a script (and rehearse it beforehand), and have someone critique the early drafts.

The results are in!

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acknowledgements, publishing, writing

In my last post, I argued (ranted?) about how authors should acknowledge the work done by peer reviewers in their manuscript.  Being an ecologist, I wanted to quantify this somehow, so I took the most recent issues of Ecology (Vol. 92, no. 12; 2012), the Journal of Animal Ecology (Vol. 82, no. 1; 2013) and Oecologia (Vol. 171, no. 2; 2013).  Each issue contained 25-27 research articles (i.e., not an editorial or book review).  Here are the numbers:

	Thanked anonymous reviewers
Journal	Yes	No
Ecology	12	13
Journal of Animal Ecology	14	11
Oecologia	12	15
Overall	38	39

 

So just under half of the papers don’t acknowledge the reviewers.  A couple of points: some of these papers did acknowledge others who had read the manuscript, and identified them by name; some of these could be reviewers who chose not to remain anonymous.  Almost all the papers thanked some funding agency (I think there was one that didn’t).

But why should we thank these anonymous persons who act as gate-keepers?  Because without them, there would be no peer-reviewed science.  Even if the reader (or authors) don’t know who the reviewers are, I think they should still be included.  After all, readers don’t know how much “J.D. Smith” contributed to the lab work (heck, he could’ve been the undergrad hired to wash the glassware).  In some cases, I’ve sent an article of interest to a colleague who wrote back to say that they had reviewed it (and usually accompanied with some commentary on whether the authors heeded their suggestions or not).  Like it or not, but this does influence my perception of the manuscript.

So, while we might not know who the reviewers are, we know damned well what they do, and the price for which they do it (freely).  I think that’s worth 8 words.

Reviewer to author: acknowledge

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acknowledgements, peer review, polls, writing

Though flawed, the cornerstone of scholarship has always been the peer review.  The cut-and-dry version goes like this: academics research and write a manuscript, and then send it to a journal.  The editor first makes a decision about whether the manuscript is suitable for the journal, and meets some standard.  If it does, s/he will send it to anywhere from 1-4 other experts in the field, who will read it, and provide their comments on the submission back to the editor, who will make a decision and inform the author(s).

Now, let’s look at it from the reviewers’ perspective.  Potential reviewers are contacted by the journal and asked to assess the manuscript.  They can either accept or decline.  If they accept, they have some period of time (generally 3-4 weeks) to provide their review back to the editor.

Obviously, the quality of reviews varies A LOT.  I’ve had reviews that were 5 lines, and others that were 8 pages.  But length alone shouldn’t be an indicator of the quality of a review.

In my experience, I’ve received more good reviews than bad reviews (in terms of their quality, not their decision about whether the journal should accept my manuscript).  And I try to pick out what I like from others’ reviews (techniques, format, etc) and incorporate it into my own style.  I tend to write lengthy reviews, but many of the comments are usually relatively minor, and would take 1-2 minutes to fix (e.g., suggestions to improve readability, grammar, etc).  But the bottom line is that I try to improve the manuscript by giving critical feedback.

Which is why it irks me when I see a manuscript I’ve reviewed (sometimes 2-3 times) finally appear in a journal, but fail to acknowledge the editor or reviewers.  Did they not contribute to the manuscript (though not enough to merit authorship*)?  It’s a simple one-liner in the acknowledgements:

We thank Person A, Person, B, and n anonymous reviewers for improving this manuscript.

Person A and Person B would be people that the authors asked to review the manuscript themselves before submitting (something everyone should do!), or the editor if they provided substantive feedback.

But perhaps this is just because most authors can’t stand my reviews, and purpously snub the reviewers in their acknowledgements by not mentioning them.  So I decided to look at a recent issue of a couple of journals I haven’t reviewed for in the last 2 years: Ecology, Journal of Animal Ecology, and Oecologia, and see what proportion of published articles acknowledged those involved in the review process.

I’ll reveal the results in this week’s Friday Scribbles, so I’d like to know what you estimate:

 

*though I can think of a couple of reviews I’ve done where I contemplated asking, given the amount of time and effort I put in to them!

Friday scribbles: more abstract ideas

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abstract, digital, ideas, video

This week, I wanted to draw your attention to an article in University Affairs that looks at the “video abstract”.

“We see younger researchers using video abstracts to scan literature quickly,” explains Cameron Macdonald, executive director of the Ottawa-based publisher Canadian Science Publishing (formerly NRC Research Press). The press has launched a video abstract option for authors who are publishing in its 15 journals.

If you read my post about graphical abstracts, you can probably guess where I stand on this issue: if you’re going to make a video abstract, make sure it doesn’t look like a poorly-dubbed high school science project.

 

Here’s an example of a researcher reading a script from a screen in front of a webcam.  It’s generally not engaging, there’s a humming in the background, the lighting is poor, the video is cropped, and it’s obvious she’s reading.

 

Here’s a good example – it’s produced by the university, the researcher is wearing a mic (on her right lapel), and is actually engaging with the audience rather than reading.

I should note that I took both of these from Canadian Science Publishing’s website.

These videos can be great promotional tools for universities and labs, but like graphical abstracts (and websites, which I argued years ago in University Affairs), you’ve got to spend the time to make them look professional.

Friday scribbles: an abstract abstract idea

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abstract, digital, graphics

After yesterday’s post on abstracts, a colleague asked what I thought of “graphical abstracts“.  I’m sure we’ve all seen them – a single image that supposedly captures the essence of the paper that seems to be pushed by Elsevier, among other publishers.

Please. Don’t. Do. It.

I’m all for “TOC art” (the journal “Ecology and Evolution” tends to have a photograph accompany each article), but when it comes to graphical design, scientists leave much to be desired

Actual TOC art for an article in the ACS journal “Organometallics”. Click the image to read the actual paper.

First of all, it’s embarrassing.  Journal articles are, for better or worse, a significant part of how academics are judged by their peers.  Including a kitschy graphical abstract does nothing else but highlight the authors inadequacies in graphical design.  Which is not surprising since most scientists aren’t designers.

And, like it or not, aesthetics plays a major role in how journals themselves are seen.  If you read a bunch of journal articles, you’ll find that after a while, you can figure out which journal an article is published in just from the layout (typeface, kerning, organization, and general layout).  And whether we recognize it or not, we have a subconscious reaction to this design. It’s akin to consumers’ perceptions of a given brand because, let’s face it, journals are brands.  And when a brand “looks ugly”, I think that, at least subconsciously, our perceptions of the content.

More and more ecologists are becoming decent amateur photographers, especially since the price of high-resolution digital single-lens reflex cameras has dropped considerably, and the cost of taking many photographs is essentially zero (except computer storage space).  This has resulted in more scientist-produced images being used as journal covers or TOC art, and is generally a good thing.  The images are of high quality, and meet certain criteria.

Until more scientists learn to use Adobe Illustrator or understand the principles of graphic design, for the love of Darwin, leave the graphics to the graphics experts.

Should I include TOC art? Let’s think about it for a minute. [click to link to the article]

Friday Scribbles: abstract ideas

Tags

abstract, digital, inverse pyramid, key words, writing

While I’m busy in the lab most days this week, I thought it would be a good time to talk about things that are supposed to save us time when reading papers – the abstract.  If you recall in my last Friday Scribbles, I usually write the abstract last.  This is exactly the opposite way my PhD supervisor suggested, but I think I have some good reasons for waiting until the end.

In “ye olden days of yore” before electronic Table of Contents (eTOC) alerts, Web of Knowledge, or Google Scholar (and also when I started my undergrad degree, so just over 10 years ago), the main way academics found new papers in their field was by 1) subscribing to relevant journals personally or browsing new issues in the Library, or 2) consulting Biological Abstracts.  Biological Abstracts is (it still exists!) a regular publication that, as the title may suggest, prints the abstracts of indexed biological journals.  These abstracts were categorized, so I might check out the ecology or zoology sections.  And essentially, I would browse the tome (hundreds or thousands of pages published each month) looking for any papers of interest, or use an annual index for certain topics.  Biological Abstracts is online now, and integrated into Web of Knowledge.

But in this pre-digital age, the abstract was incredibly important since it could make or break whether an academic tracked down and read the whole article.  Nowadays, the abstract isn’t even sent in eTOC alerts for many journals (e.g., those published online at BioOne, and some titles published by Wiley or Springer) – just the title and authors (and sometimes the page range).  But abstracts are still an important part of papers.  So how do I write them?

In the 3rd year of my undergrad degree, I took a course called “Theoretical and Evolutionary Ecology”.  This was my first experience writing an abstract.  Our prof gave us a photocopy of a complete paper, but the abstract was removed.  We had one week to write an abstract for the paper (on egg size vs. number in trout, if I recall).  We then turned these in, and with our graded abstract, she provided the actual abstract of the paper.  I think this is a great way to get students writing abstracts, and to introduce them to critical reading of the primary literature.

One of my papers with the abstract removed.

Abstracts at most journals have one thing in common: they have a maximum length.  This can range from 100-300 words depending in the journal or contribution type (short communication vs. full paper vs. review).  One of the reasons I like to write the abstract last is because by that time I have a pretty good idea of where I want to submit the paper.  Some journals (e.g., those like Journal of Animal Ecology published by the British Ecological Society) also have specific formats and requirements for their abstracts.  I’ll focus on the more common “free-form” type of abstract between 250-300 words.

I generally break the abstract into the same sections as my paper:

• Introduction: 2-3 sentences
• Methods: 1-2 sentences
• Results: 2-3 sentences
• Discussion: 2-4 sentences

I usually start my papers’ introduction with a broad idea, theory, or concept, so this usually forms the first sentence of my abstract.  The next two focus in on my problem, and state my actual objective.  I don’t think I can emphasize this last point enough.

The description of methods is brief, but sufficient to tell the reader what I did: “I measured floor tiles in 23 academic and 25 government buildings in April 2012”.  Unless my analysis is novel, or atypical, I generally leave out anything about the statistics since these details will interest only a small number of readers.

It’s nice to include some actual numbers in the abstract: “Government floor tiles (0.04 ± 0.01 m2) were significantly smaller than academic floor tiles (0.06 ± 0.01 m2)”.  Notice that I didn’t put in any p-values, F-ratios, AIC weights, etc.  Remember – this is supposed to be the “take home message”.

The last part of the abstract puts my results in the context of the introduction, and I usually wrap up with a concluding sentence.

Lastly, some journals also request between 4-10 key words.  These should be chosen to maximize the searchable terms so that others will find your paper.  If you include a species name in the title, there’s no need to include it in the key words since most searches are for terms in the title and key words – don’t use up a valuable key word repeating what’s already in the title.  Use higher taxonomic groups or English common names (if not in the title), geographic areas/study sites, or the major concept in the first part of the introduction.  They key (get it?) is to have your paper appear in search results for people writing papers that would cite your work.

Friday scribbles: Breaking writers’ block with an outline

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inverse pyramid, outline, writing

A couple of colleagues asked about how I write, and what they could do to improve their writing.  There’s no catchall solution for everyone, since everyone works differently.  So I though that I would start by outlining how I go about organizing a manuscript (or report or thesis chapter).  This is the first part of a series of Friday posts on how I write, and some tips or tricks to help folks along.  This is by no means THE way to write a paper, but it works for me.  The only way to find what works for you is to try different things until one clicks.

First, I start with an outline – the major sections (abstract, key words, introduction, methods, results, discussion, acknowledgements, literature cited, tables, figure legends, figures).  I might end up deleting some of these later (if I don’t include any tables, for example), but that’s OK.  Then I break each section down into subsections or even paragraphs, usually beginning with the methods.

If we’ve done a study, we all know what methods we used.  Subsections here could include study site, sample preparation, and usually one for statistical analysis.  As I go through, I’ll make little bullet-point notes to myself like “treatment differences – ANOVA/Tukey’s”, which would remind me that I used an analysis of variance with Tukey’s post-hoc test to look at differences among treatments.

Then, I usually go to the introduction and discussion.  “Wait a minute!” I hear you say, “Those are at opposite ends of the manuscript!”.  Yep, they sure are.  But like bookends on a shelf, they should mirror each other, so I outline them together.  I don’t know if my technique has a formal name, so I’ll call it the “inverse pyramid” technique.  I start in the introduction and write the main topic of each paragraph.  The first paragraph is usually very broad, and outlines the conceptual framework.  The next series of paragraphs get progressively more specific until the last one, where I outline my study’s objectives.  Here’s a quick example of an outline for a manuscript on writing blog posts about writing:

• Writing is an important communication tool
• Organization and presentation are important
• Scientific writing is specialized
• Academics receive little formal training in scientific writing
• Especially try for grad students – expected to write a large thesis / series of papers
• Most grad student training in writing comes from peers
• Objective: outline my writing method

But recall that I said I outlined the discussion at the same time?  It’s paragraphs / subsections are the inverse of those in the introduction.  I mean, why introduce something if you’re not going to discuss it?  The first paragraph summarizes the main finding(s), and subsequent paragraphs work back up the ladder of topics covered in the intro.  The last paragraph or two puts my results in a broader context.  In ecology, this is usually the “who cares” part – why would someone not studying your species or your site etc. want to read your paper?  How does it fit with the conceptual framework you presented in the intro?

Then I “fill in the blanks”, so to speak, fleshing out each subsection to a full paragraph or two (depending on how detailed my outline was).  Not only does this help me keep from wandering off on digressions, but it also makes writing manageable.  If I can knock off a small paragraph in the intro, it’s like crossing that outline point off my list.

Sections like literature cited, tables and figures (and their legends) usually settle themselves in the course of the other sections.  Then I go back and write the abstract.  In my 3^rd year of undergrad, I took a course in theoretical and evolutionary ecology.  This was my first exposure to writing abstracts, and my prof at the time gave us a paper with the abstract removed. Our job was to supply the summary, and she gave some simple guidelines: 2-3 sentences for the intro, 1-2 for the methods, 2-3 for the results, and 3-4 for the discussion & main conclusions.

Subsequent posts will focus on particular aspects (figures and tables are up next week!).  If there’s something you want me to cover, leave it in the comments below.