Government Guidelines for Concise and Clear Writing
Brian Curran sends me this article in Government Executive called “8 Tips to Improve Your (And Your Agency’s) Writing”. This guidance comes from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, who recently developed a Writing Style Guide. You can download this 114-page PDF here. After those 8 tips, the author provides this Pop Quiz. Pop Quiz: Which […]
The Importance of Not Being Cited
This title comes from a 1973 paper in Current Contents by Eugene Garfield called “Uncitedness III—The Importance of Not Being Cited”. In there, Garfield talks about three reasons why papers may not be cited. I. “the uncitedness of the mediocre, the unintelligible, the irrelevant, the eccentric.” II. “the uncitedness of the meritorious but undiscovered or […]
How to determine authorship order quantitatively
Feuding coauthors on your paper? Petty arguments about who did more work? Colleagues whining because you didn’t include them in the author list of your latest Nature paper? I recently discovered the following paper, which reminded me of several articles that produce a quantitative approach to determining author order. Authorship of scientific articles within an […]
Communicating low-probability events
April 14, 2013 Filed under Blog, Featured, Publishing
The authors start by asking, “What is the best way to communicate the risk of rare but extreme weather to the public?” Through a role-playing game where students pretended to be in charge of a road-salting operation, LeClerc and Joslyn (2012) found that the students were more likely to salt when receiving forecasts of temperatures […]
A note on good research practice: Dooley (2013)
April 8, 2013 Filed under Blog, Featured, Publishing, Reviewing, Writing
An editorial in the International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control is entitled “A note on good research practice.” Dooley states: By far the most common issue we editors of this journal are seeing in terms of poor scientific practice in submissions is the failure to appropriately cite the work of others. Sadly, we see numerous […]
