C&E News on writing journal articles.

Since scientist-on-scientist communication is a longstanding topic of interest in these parts, I wanted to point out a recent (August 13, 2007) article in Chemical & Engineering News (behind a paywall, but definitely worth locating a library with a subscription) that offers tips for writing journal articles. It's quite a substantial article, drawing on advice from "dozens of scientists and engineers around the world in academia, industry, and government" -- which is to say, the people who read and write journal articles as part of their jobs.

It goes without saying that this crowd has some strong views.

One thing you might wonder is how chemists (among other scientists) learn how to write journal articles in the first place. According to the article:

Many chemists and engineers learn journal article writing do's and don'ts by example from graduate or postdoctoral advisers. That is, the students examine published articles, write drafts, discuss edits, and revise multiple times. Professors admit that a manuscript could be completed much faster if they wrote it themselves, but the exercise would lose its educational value.

I think it's a good thing that graduate and postdoctoral advisors see it as part of their job to help their advisees learn to write good papers for the peer-reviewed literature. It's less obvious, though, that advisors always have a good grasp of how to teach their advisees the relevant skills. Some scientists are more reflective about their writing, and some have probably even had good training in pedagogy. But in my experience, there's often an assumption made that if you know your subject, you can teach a trainee what s/he needs to know to get the job done. That's as risky as the assumption that if you know your subject, you can write about it clearly.

That C&E News is running this article, however, shows that someone got the memo that writing is a skill that can be learned and taught rather than a natural talent that you either have or don't.

The article gives the clearest articulation I've seen so far of the norms for authorship in the community of chemistry:

The first author is usually the person who contributes significantly to the research and assembles the manuscript. In academic settings, the first author generally is a graduate student or postdoc. In industrial or government settings, the first author may be a principal investigator (PI), staff research associate, or postdoc. Sometimes the first author and the corresponding author are the same person. The corresponding author in most cases is the PI, who probably holds the grant and oversees the work from idea through preparation of the manuscript.

Of course, there are lots of local variations in how authorship is negotiated (with some interesting shifts in where PIs show up in the author lists pre-tenure versus post-tenure), and there's no mention of the right way to work out the order of the authors listed between the first author and the corresponding author. Still, it's nice to see some awareness that the ordered list of authors communicates something to the reader. Indeed, in the list of 12 tips for writing a journal article, number 3 is:

Clarify authorship carefully. Sometimes the authorship is straightforward; sometimes it's not. Authorship on journal articles can become an ethical issue, and in certain cases, disputes have cost scientists their jobs and reputations. "Be meticulous and make sure that authorship is correct," recommends Sean B. Seymore, a professor of patent law at Northwestern University who holds a doctorate in chemistry and has written about authorship abuse (http://law.richmond.edu/jolt/v12i3/article11.pdf).

The dozen tips the articles gives are all really useful. I'll just mention two more that jumped out at me:

Tip 6. Know your audience. Nonspecialists will read your journal article. [Cornell University chemistry professor Roald] Hoffmann advises scientists to "write the manuscript for an intelligent graduate student, not a professor."

When writing up interdisciplinary work, take nothing for granted and explain everything, says University of Iowa physical chemist Vicki H. Grassian, who works on environment-related surface science and nanotechnology. For example, she has had reviewers repeatedly question particular calculations for atmospheric reactions that have been "routinely done in heterogeneous catalysis for more than 50 years," she says.

This isn't surprising advice, but it's important. The point of writing is communication, so thinking about what your audience already knows is important in getting your message across successfully.

And, a tip that's important for more reasons that you might think at first:

Tip 1. Conduct thorough literature searches and cite precedents. "Good literature searching allows you to provide a cogent paper that is well-thought-out and well-organized, and it also keeps you from embarrassing yourself," says analytical chemist W. Jeffrey Hurst at the Hershey Co. For example, it behooves you to discover earlier rather than later "that what you thought was seminal work has been reported on 12 times" already, he says.

Of course, it's important to give credit to the scientists whose work paved the way for your own. But it's also really important to be aware of what other scientists have already done in the area you're researching. Probably, it would be worth figuring this out before you sit down to design your experiments, but if this detail gets away from you, finding out whether your results are groundbreaking or instead merely confirm what others have already reported might give you more realistic expectations as to how enthusiastically the journal editor will receive your manuscript. (I don't have to tell you, do I, that one should never cite literature one has not read?)

All in all, a very useful article, and one I hope will get chemists talking with their students (and each other) about ways to make journal articles even better instruments of communication.