Scientific and Medical Communication

A Guide for Effective Practice

Scott A. Mogull

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138842557
• eBook ISBN: 9781317551966
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Scientific and Medical Communication: A Guide for Effective Practice prepares readers to effectively communicate in professional scientific communities. The material in this book is firmly grounded in more than 500 published research findings and editorials by scientific writers, authors, and journal editors. Thus, this text provides the broadest and most comprehensive analysis of scientific writing. In addition, carefully selected and thoroughly annotated examples from the scientific and medical literature demonstrate the recommendations covered in the text.

These real-world examples were carefully selected so that the scientific content can be understood by those without a detailed background in any particular scientific or medical field—thus clearly illustrating the content organization and writing style. This text will prepare individuals to write and edit scientific manuscripts, conference abstracts, posters, and press releases according to journal and professional standards. Readers will also learn to conduct effective searches of the scientific and medical literature, as well as proper citation practices.

Section II

Writing Journal Articles

4

Communicating Research in Primary Journals

In this chapter, you will learn to:

• Plan articles of original research
• Identify a journal to submit research
• Obtain style and formatting instructions from a journal

Overview

When I began the writing phase of my molecular biology research, I remembered the advice from a senior scientist, Elizabeth Wyckoff (pers. comm.), who had decades of experience and a few dozen articles. We sat down in the back of the laboratory and she began by saying, “What you want to do is to tell a story.” On scrap paper she began to scribble down the list of key points that I should present. For example, I had data showing that a specific mutant strain of bacteria was able to infect, but not spread, human cell-tissue cultures. In another experiment, I had findings that the mutant bacteria grew more slowly than normal bacteria in a culture media that mimicked intercellular conditions. In a yet another experiment, I had data showing that these mutant bacteria were much more sensitive to acidic conditions than normal bacteria. Each of these key points, and several more, was the outcome of a different experiment. At this point, I, like many researchers, had collected a handful of individual data sets, or the results from discrete experiments, but I did not see how all of this data fit together. The story that I was to develop and convey in a journal article would connect each of these individual data sets and provide a logical flow leading from one experiment to the next and then fitting all of the results that I reported into the overall thesis of the journal article.

When Dr. Wyckoff and now I suggest that you “tell a story” in SMC, you should not confuse the term “story” with fiction writing. Writers of SMC often refer to the “story” or “narrative” of research as a post hoc rationalization that connects the outcomes of fruitful experiments but excludes accounts of tangential investigations and dead ends (Schriger 2005). As the noted scholars Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar (1986) described in Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, the story that researchers construct is “widely regarded by outsiders as well organized, logical, and coherent, [but] in fact consists of a disordered array of observations with which scientists struggle to produce order” (36). Much of the organization and connections of the research occurs during the research phase, yet the entire story or narrative is usually not formally articulated until the writing process (Zhang 1989). Therefore, you should refine your view of a journal article in that it “is not a report of what went on in the laboratory, but rather the product of the laboratory effort” (Markel 1993, 17). This revised perspective emphasizes an important change from the naive perspective that journal articles merely summarize and detail a log of events, as in a laboratory notebook, to realizing that journal articles are actually a carefully constructed argument regarding a scientific phenomenon.

How to Prepare

Journal articles are written after the data have been collected and organized and the research team is ready to share the findings as a complete story (Phillips 2009). From a practical standpoint, this means that the researchers will have outlined, or at least thought about, the argument in the article. As you will see, each individual experiment from multifaceted investigation provides a different data set that becomes a piece of the larger argument, which ultimately forms the thesis of the journal article. Although the thesis has been conceptualized, you should be flexible and consider the thesis somewhat tentative because it usually evolves and is refined in each draft of the journal article manuscript. As you will see, with this perspective, the distinction between research and writing becomes less defined or partitioned.

What to Expect

As a writer, you role is to take the data from fruitful experiments and write a manuscript to submit to a scientific or medical journal. Manuscripts should be considered a specific genre that communicates research between a research team and the journal editors and reviewers. Although the content of the manuscript and journal article are the same, the design or appearance is much different. Manuscripts must adhere to specific format and style guidelines that look more similar to a double-spaced research paper submitted in a college course than the final design of an article in the printed journal. Proper manuscript formatting facilitates the peer-reviewing, copyediting, and typesetting processes. Unfortunately for writers, journals have different style and formatting requirements, and editors of scientific and medical journals often refuse to review manuscripts that do not follow these requirements.

This chapter is designed to guide you, as a writer, through manuscript planning and design. It serves as an overview of the communication of original research to scientific and medical journals. In following chapters, we will cover the specific content and scientific writing style of each section of a journal article.

Planning Articles of Original Research

Before you begin writing the manuscript for a journal article, you need to collect information and make decisions about the publication venue. Specifically, you need to gather technical content from the research team, select a target journal (where you plan to submit the manuscript), and obtain style and submission guidelines from that journal (called the Instructions to Authors).

Step 1: Gathering Technical Content from the Research Team

Technical content is the core of SMC. As Peter Driscoll (1997) of Hope Hospital stated, “If you [as the author] are not clear on what is to be described, then it is likely that the reader will be equally confused” (65). As the writer you need to collect and organize the technical content, which should include the following:

1. The thesis statement or overall argument of the research article,
2. Data sets to present (either as raw data or in tables and figures, and preferably in order of presentation for the argument), and
3. Experimental protocol or procedures used to obtain the data (annotated with the specific detail that you need to write the Methods section).

In addition to the technical content for the journal article, you should gather any previously published journal articles, poster presentations, review articles, or grant proposals authored by colleagues that were related to the current research. The research genres (journal articles and poster presentations), in particular, will serve as useful models for constructing your manuscript.

In general, researchers are willing to share articles and other background information if they have the information readily available and they are providing it at the beginning of a project. More senior researchers expect that novice members of the research team will require assistance at the beginning of new writing projects and are usually generous with providing help and guidance. But you should also demonstrate your own initiative in collecting information that is available in databases (see Chapter 3). You should only request information that your colleagues have readily available or that you are unable to find on your own since these researchers will, at some point, expect you to be able to work independently and locate the information that you need.

Step 2: Selecting a Target Journal

Before you begin writing the manuscript, you should identify the target journal that is the one journal to which you plan to submit a manuscript for review and allow the opportunity to make the initial publishing decision. By convention, authors submit a research manuscript to only one journal at a time and wait for a publishing decision before submitting it to another journal. Therefore you should carefully select a target journal during the planning phase to avoid a delay in publishing the research that would occur by submitting it to a journal that is not an appropriate fit for the research (Boellstorff 2011; Gasparyan 2013; John 2009; Wachs 1996). The manuscript review process often takes several months, so a rejection by one journal will add several months to the process and, additionally, often requires revision in style and format before you can submit the research to another journal (Naylor and Muñoz-Viveros 2005). Ideally the entire manuscript should be revised for a different journal because each journal has a slightly different audience and scope. As Teijlingen and Hundley (2002) of the University of Aberdeen warned authors, “A common mistake made by novice researchers is to write a paper and then look for a journal in which to publish” (508). Rather, you need to know the exact audience, scope, style, and formatting of a journal before you begin to write the manuscript. Otherwise...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor Foreword
• Guest Foreword
• Section I Foundations
• Section II Writing Journal Articles
• Section III Presenting Research at Conferences
• Section IV Communicating Research Findings with the Public and News Media
• Appendixes
• References
• Index