How to Fail in Grant Writing
Curtis Wood (Univ of Reading) sends this article from The Chronicle of Higher Education. How to Fail in Grant Writing Another in the series of “How Not To…” papers… Fourteen Ways to Say Nothing with Scientific Visualization. How to Make a Scientific Lecture Unbearable. How to Get Your Paper Rejected. How to Write Consistently Boring […]
A heretical parenthetical thought
George Bryan sent me this article from the 9 November 2010 issue of Eos. Robock, A., 2010: Parentheses are (are not) for references and clarification (saving space). Eos, 91 (45), p. 419. Prof. Robock makes a strong case that sentences like the following are not clear, and that the added space in writing the sentence […]
A title in need of some help
This paper was published in Nature Geoscience in 2008. “Recent Antarctic ice mass loss from radar interferometry and regional climate modelling” My first reaction was “If radar interferometry and regional climate modelling are causing ice mass loss, then stop it, for the Earth’s sake!” — Photograph by Tim Laman/National Geographic Society
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 […]
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
October 12, 2010 Filed under Blog, Featured, Reviewing, Uncategorized
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 […]
History of the Scientific Article
I just finished reading a fascinating book, if you are interested in the history of how scientific literature came to be. It’s called Communicating Science: The Scientific Article from the 17th Century to the Present by Gross, Harmon, and Reidy. As the book describes, previous studies of the literature have focused on specific periods, regions, […]
