I discovered the following article a while ago, yet only have gotten around to writing about it now.

Alon, U., 2009: How to choose a good scientific problem. Molecular Cell, 35, 726-728. [PDF] [HTML]

Why the paper resonated with me is that it brought me back to choosing my research topic for my PhD. I knew the topic I wanted to work on for my PhD, and I had a good sense of what the answer was when I started in 1991, but I didn’t know how to go about proving my hypothesis was true. My advisors let me wander for two years before gently nudging me toward the methods that I would finally adopt in my PhD thesis, completed in 1996. Their valuable advice to just “go look at the weather maps and see what you see” is now being applied to a new generation of my students and postdocs.

I enjoyed scanning through Uri Alon’s Web site on nurturing young scientists here.

I just finished reading a new book Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded by Prof. Joshua Schimel, in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology at UC Santa Barbara.

Schimel’s book is the perfect companion to Eloquent Science. Whereas Eloquent Science provides guidance about how to write better science, Writing Science provides more specific information about how to employ that guidance, along with plenty of worked examples. Along the way, he provides some great insights into the scientific writing process. Some of my favorite quotes follow.

It is the author’s job to make the reader’s job easy. (p. 5)

Do you write “Smith (2003) found X” or do you write “X occurs (Smith 2003)”? The former tells a story about Smith and what she did; the latter, about nature and how it works. If you write the former, you are probably doing a data dump, collecting the information that seems relevant and writing it down, without synthesizing it and integrating it into a story or framing a knowledge gap. The important information is almost never that Smith found it; it is almost always what she found. So why make Smith the subject of the sentence? (p. 56)

Within a sentence, showing action is the job of verbs and it’s an important job. Good writers use their verbs well, imbuing their papers with life. Bad writers use them poorly, stealing energy from the story, leaving it dull and listless. (p. 133)

Doing science is inherently an act of both confidence and humility. Confidence in developing your own ideas and data, doing the work knowing it may fail, and then putting it out in public where people can criticize it (and you). Humility in that you know that those data and ideas are imperfect and incomplete, and you have to admit openly to the limitations. Too much confidence can blind you to the limitations; too much humility can blind you to the accomplishments. Getting the balance between confidence and humility right is one of the greatest challenges all developing scientists face, in both doing and writing science. (p. 190).

“Publish or perish” may be the basis for survival, but it is not the basis for success. (p. 206)

If you are interesting in developing your writing to a deeper level than Eloquent Science goes into, Writing Science is the perfect book for you. I am aware of no other book on the market that presents this essential information so effectively and so clearly.

Full disclosure: Prof. Schimel wrote a positive review on amazon.com about Eloquent Science.

I can speak for myself only, but it seems to me that if you send a high-quality scientific manuscript to a British journal using American English (or an American journal using British English), then, the reviewers and editor are unlikely to reject the manuscript because you spelled “favour” as “favor”. They may ask you to convert the manuscript the best you can, which is certainly not unreasonable. In the event they don’t, most quality journals with decent copyediting will make the conversion for you. Nevertheless, it doesn’t hurt to do your best before submission.

Remember: when in Rome, do as the Romans do!

Here are a set of resources that you might find useful.

The instructions to Authors Web site for your target journal. Usually the journal may provide some instructions to the authors about style. In any case, emulate the papers that you see published in your target journal.

Oxford Dictionary for Scientific Writers and Editors

The Oxford Style Manual

Fowler’s Modern English Usage

And for Brits publishing in American journals:
Scientific Style And Format: The CSE Manual for Authors, Editors, And Publishers (CSE, Scientific Style and Format)

Thanks to Michelle at Corporate Writing Pro for some of the suggestions above. Image from <http://www.enduringamerica.com>.

I am honored to have seen page proofs of Gary Lackmann’s new book Midlatitude Synoptic Meteorology: Dynamics, Analysis, and Forecasting to be published later this year by the American Meteorological Society. For this book, Gary goes back to the original meaning of the word synoptic (“forming a summary or synopsis”). Twelve chapters summarize and synthesize all scales of motion, from the planetary down to the microphysical, not just those on the synoptic scale.

This is the first new book on synoptic meteorology in 20 years, and its appearance is long overdue. Lackmann’s book updates previous textbooks with new concepts and synthesizes material that has not appeared in textbooks before. His last three chapters on numerical weather prediction, weather forecasting, and manual analysis contain some material that hasn’t been updated since Petterssen’s (1956) textbook.

What is best about this book is that it rises to the challenge offered by Rossby: to bridge the gap between theory and observations. No other book on synoptic meteorology had done this as throughly or as effectively. Lackmann skillfully weaves back and forth from QG, PV, and EnKF to cold fronts aloft, cold-air damming, and cold-air outbreaks.

I could quibble about some points, but I won’t. You’ll want this book. In terms of style and content, it is the perfect companion to Markowski and Richardson’s Mesoscale Meteorology in Midlatitudes. These two books form an ideal and unique set from which to build a solid undergraduate or graduate curriculum blending synoptic-scale and mesoscale dynamical meteorology and forecasting.

Not since the 1990s has a useful, intelligent synoptic meteorology book been written by an expert in the field. Lackmann fulfills a desperate need among today’s teachers and students.

[Disclaimer: Gary and I went to my very first Eric Clapton concert together (Tacoma 1988). Later, we ended up at SUNY Albany together, part of the early to mid 1990s milieu there. I consider him a close friend and one of the best synoptic meteorologists and teachers out there now.]

Have you read an article where the author talks about “an important process” or “the important role of another process”?

Do these sort of platitudes go in one of your ears and out the other? Are you convinced by the author’s use of the word “important” that it truly is an important process? Or, do you want to see the supporting evidence for why it is important?

How about quantifying exactly how important that particular process is? If calculations show that varying the input only led to a 20% change in the output, is that an “important” effect?

Given that multiple processes usually come together to produce a weather event, is isolating one process as “important” a realistic description of how the atmosphere works?

They say that the First Rule of Writing is to show, not tell. Thus, you should avoid telling the readers how important something is, and show them instead.

(Image from smartpassiveincome.com)

Several authors have criticized the use of the term overrunning to represent warm-frontal lifting here and here.

I don’t need to add anything to those Web pages, but I do want to point out that the definition provided in the American Meteorological Society’s Glossary of Meteorology is wrong and ambiguous.

overrunning—A condition existing when an air mass aloft is in motion relative to another air mass of greater density at the surface.
This term is usually applied in the case of warm air ascending the surface of a warm front or quasi-stationary front.

An air mass aloft will always be less dense than air at the surface. Therefore, every instance of sheared flow could classify as overrunning by that definition. As Stoelinga et al. (2002, BAMS) point out about ascent over fronts, it’s not the density or temperature that is important, but the static stability. The warm air flows over a warm-frontal zone because the warm air is less stable than the frontal zone (highly stable). With this ambiguity and the problems already stated, I recommend that everyone avoid the use of overrunning.

Consider the following quotes from that article.

When we contemplate the astonishing magnitude [of the literature] in any department of science … there is the greatest reason to apprehend that, from the continual multiplication of new essays which are merely repetitions of others that have been forgotten, the sciences will shortly be overwhelmed by their own unwieldy bulk. – Thomas Young (1807)

In 1894, a letter to Nature was complaining: ‘A search for previously published work is already sufficiently difficult to cause many to shrink from the task: ten years hence it may be expected to be the most laborious and thankless work which the investigator has to perform’.

Chemical literature is fast becoming unmanageable and uncontrollable from its very vastness. Not only is the number of papers increasing from year to year, but new journals are constantly being established. Something must be done in order to assist chemists to remain in touch with their subject and to retain their hold on the literature generally. – H.E. Armstrong (1894)

Vickery, B., 1999: A century of scientific and technical information. Journal of Documentation, 55 (5), 476-527.

Although it is wordier than warm or cold, the meaning is precise.

3 month thesis by James Hayton has a free guide that you can sign up to receive called “The Short Guide to Writing Fast.” Inside I found this concise quote about when you should cite a paper (p. 20):

You should only cite a paper…
• To support one of your arguments
• To provide extra information
• As sources of reliable data
• To provide context or comparison for your work.

Great advice!

Do you really think the audience needs to know what the basic content of your scientific presentation is going to be? Even in longer talks, is such a slide really needed?

When I see one of these slides, I think to myself that I have 30-90 seconds to daydream some more before the talk starts. The speaker immediately has lost my attention.

That’s not what you want to do to make a good first impression and get the audience enthused about your work.

Instead, motivate the talk, tell a story about why this is an interesting problem, or start off with a shocking fact that demands explanation.

Do anything to keep the audience interested in you and not thinking about where they are going to go for lunch once the session is over.

(Image by Sean Seaver at P212121.com, who also is no fan of outline slides.)