Teaching Scientific Communication Skills – BAMS article

My experiences teaching a scientific communications laboratory course based on Eloquent Science is described in a recent article published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Schultz, D. M., 2010: A university laboratory course to improve scientific communication skills. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 91, 1259–1266, ES25–34. Download the article here, along with its Electronic […]

Checklist for Statistics

I came across this statistical checklist from Nature. It details some common errors that many authors make in their manuscript, and Nature encourages authors to check this list before submission. I thought some were pretty obvious, but, then again, maybe people need to hear the obvious anyway. http://www.nature.com/nature/authors/gta/Statistical_checklist.doc Nature also has encourages additions to this […]

Review in Progress in Physical Geography

I am wishing that more scientists would follow the advice given in David Schultz’s excellent new book. The chapters are short – around ten pages each, on average – and self-contained. Therefore, readers may dip into and out of particular chapters of interest, if they prefer not to read the whole book sequentially. One reason […]

“Unnecessary” Quotation Marks

I think people use quotation marks too often in scientific manuscripts. Be brave. Boldly define your term and use it sans quotation marks. It’s good to know that someone else thinks like me. Let me introduce you to The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks.

Check your reference list!

A recent paper published in Scientometrics by Robert Lopresti looks at the accuracy of citations in the five leading environmental science journals. Lopresti found that 24.4% of the references in the reference list had errors in them. Almost half of the errors were in the authors names. Almost 30% of the errors were in the […]

“Even referees were not infallible.” – L. F. Richardson

Happy 129th birthday (11 October 1881) to Lewis Fry Richardson, who pioneered the first numerical weather prediction and for whom the Richardson number is named. Jim Matthew of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society lent me a copy of his biography Prophet or Professor? by Oliver Ashford. As I was reading it today, I came across the […]

Who wrote the first abstract in a scientific journal article?

I have often wondered how we came to the modern scientific article. One question that I had that I researched, but was unable to turn up anything on was who started the boldface and italics in the reference format for journal volume number and journal name (varies by discipline and by journal). One question that […]

Review in Progress in Physical Geography

Progress in Physical Geography has just published a review written by Dr. Paul Williams (Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading). In summary, I highly recommend this book. The author is well qualified, being both an expe- rienced leader of communications workshops and an award-winning journal editor. The writ- ing is clear (as you […]