How to be a more effective reviewer

As part of its 150th anniversary celebrations, Monthly Weather Review published my editorial “How to be a more effective reviewer”. The editorial has four sections: receiving the invitation, writing the review, after the initial review, and communicating with the editor. It provides guidance for first-time reviewers, but also experienced reviewers, to help make your reviews […]

Eliminate excessive and unnecessary acronyms from your scientific writing

Source: https://sspinnovations.com/blog/know-your-gis-and-non-gis-abbreviations-acronyms-and-initialisms/ I can’t say that there was a specific moment when I noticed it happening more often. Either it is increasing in frequency or it is testing my patience more these days. That is the tendency for authors to introduce numerous and unnecessary acronyms in their manuscripts. These authors abbreviate phrases, geographical locations, and […]

Get your paper accepted faster: Responding to reviewers’ comments

Getting your manuscript accepted at a journal can typically take one to three rounds of back and forth with reviewers, each round taking one to three months. In my experience as Editor, sometimes the process could go faster because of things that the author could have done better or done differently when writing their responses […]

“Don’t use the same word twice.”

There’s always that memory that you have from your childhood that still influences your life today. When I was probably 8 years old, someone showed me a centipede on the ground and then said, “Don’t touch it. It’s poisonous.” Of course, now I know better, but I still can’t help but be unrealistically reluctant today. […]

Eloquent Science Workshops for Your Organization

I am delivering online and in-person workshops on scientific-communication skills designed specifically for your needs.

Please don’t pass a review invitation onto your student or colleague

From time to time, I get reviewers who need to decline a review invitation, but instead tell me that they’ve passed on their review invitation to a student or colleague. The invitee may think that they are helping out the editor (in some cases, they are), but there are good reasons why they should not […]

“Improving Together: Better Science Writing Through Peer Learning”

How do you motivate early-career researchers to improve their communication skills? Mathew Stiller-Reeve from the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research in Bergen, Norway, and colleagues reveal how they were able to develop their writing and communication skills through the development of the ClimateSnack project, described in this journal article in Hydrology and Earth System Sciences. […]

Book review: Designing Science Presentations: A Visual Guide to Figures, Papers, Slides, Posters, and More

Here is another in my series of reviews for books that I read a while ago and were sitting on my desk waiting for the time to write the review. This review is of Matt Carter’s Designing Science Presentations: A Visual Guide to Figures, Papers, Slides, Posters, and More. Outside of my own book, I’ve […]

Responding to Reviewers: It’s the way you say it

Nature Methods has a few nice links over on their page about responding to criticism before and after publication. The way you say it The dos and don’ts of communicating with editors and reviewers Here are some of the choice quotes from the first link that I related to, from my experience as an author […]

How to respond to reviewers: When two reviewers say the same thing

My coauthors and I were talking about the responses to the reviewers that we were writing for a paper that was in peer review. Because two of the reviewers raised issues about the same item, my coauthor wrote a thoughtful response to Reviewer #1, then, in response to Reviewer #2, said basically, “See our response […]

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