Abstract
As he reminds us throughout, the author of this book should know what he's writing about, as he has been in the business a long time; Dr Day was, among other things, on the Publications Board of the American Society for Microbiology for some 19 years. A trans-atlantic approach first becomes evident on the second page of the Preface, with a reference to ‘graduate students’, but apart from some differences in spelling and a few words or constructions which sound awkward to the English ear (‘transmittal’ for ‘transmission’), this is not a drawback. What is more irritating is a prevailing sense of smugness: when reading the Preface I assumed the author was tongue-in-cheek while writing ‘For those of you who share my tremendous admiration for How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper, let me tell you a bit about its history’, but by the time I'd finished the whole book, I was not so sure. The author declares his intention ‘to make the reader laugh’ and has weighed things down with what I suspect he would call a ‘leavening’ of humour; he may be a good raconteur in the flesh, but writing jokes down, one soon realizes, is a quite different talent, as my first quotation suggests.
After the front matter, the text consists of no less than 35 chapters, the longest – not surprisingly, perhaps, from an editor –‘Use and misuse of English’ and ‘The review process (how to deal with editors)’, extending to 15 and 13 pages; many occupy only three or four. To summarize the contents following the author's own analysis, the first three chapters deal with the development and definition of the scientific paper of today. The next nine take the format (Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion) apart and deal with each aspect. Later chapters cover the more technical elements, including electronic publishing in Chapters 20–23, and the preparation of reviews, theses, oral presentations and posters. Finally, the linguistic aspects of writing papers are considered, and seven appendices cover abbreviations, common errors, etc.
The book contains useful advice, and for this can be recommended to beginners in the field. Dr Day points out, for example, that conference literature does not usually qualify as ‘primary literature’, the corollary of which is that it is not eligible for citation in reputable scientific journals. Chapter 13, ‘How to design effective tables’, is itself particularly effective. There are also nuggets for the more experienced. I had always assumed, for example, that the form of names used almost without variation in American journals ‘Robert S. Jones’ was another instance of that linguistic pomposity against which he quite correctly rails, but Dr Day informs us that it is required for indexing purposes (although apparently only in America?). He makes the very important point (virtually always ignored by researchers who have massaged data again and again until something reaches that P-value of 0.05), that ‘statistical analyses are often necessary, but you should feature and discuss the data, not the statistics’ (p. 39); ignoring that rule means that similar but not identical work cannot be compared. As a journal editor myself, another observation to which I warmed was ‘… keep abbreviations to a minimum. The editor will look more kindly on your paper, and the readers of your paper will bless you forever’ (p. 222).
I would take the author to task on a couple of points. He says (p. 35) that the results and conclusions should be given at the end of the Introduction – as well as in the Abstract and in the other appropriate places. Personally, I find nothing more irritating than a brief article with a structured abstract – which is almost always in itself repetitive – and the main results and conclusions stated over and over again. No one reads the Introduction, I would suggest, who has not already seen the Abstract. The chapter on ‘Ethics, rights, and permissions’ 1 read with interested anticipation, as this is a ‘hot topic’ in scientific publishing today, but found to my dismay that it deals only with the ethics of publishing, not with the ethics of the work that is carried out and submitted. This is only one of a number of points at which I wished Dr Day had gone into his subject in more depth. He gives little advice on, for example, interpreting results once they've been obtained, or structuring a discussion which deals with several overlapping areas. While somebody carrying out formal research with senior academics might get this sort of guidance from them, a junior doctor in a smallish general hospital who bought this book hoping that a borderline paper might be pushed up a few notches could feel somewhat let down.
There are several competing publications, a number listed in the bibliography, not necessarily covering quite the same range of topics. I confess to not having read them all, which prevents my offering a comparative evaluation. However, the person starting out on a scientific or medical career could do a lot worse than to purchase this book, and their seniors might well benefit from browsing through it once they've done so.