Writing tips for abstracts
A May 1, 2015 news item on phys.org profiles research that contradicts every writing tip you’ve ever gotten about abstracts for your science research,
When writing the abstracts for journal articles, most scientists receive similar advice: keep it short, dry, and simple. But a new analysis by University of Chicago researchers of over one million abstracts finds that many of these tips backfire, producing abstracts cited less than their long, flowery, and jargon-filled peers.
“What I think is funny is there’s this disconnect between what you’d like to read, and what scientists actually cite,” said Stefano Allesina, professor of evolution and ecology at the University of Chicago, Computation Institute fellow and faculty, and senior author of the study. “It’s very suggestive that we should not trust writing tips we take for granted.”
During a seminar for incoming graduate students on how to write effective abstracts, Allesina wondered whether there was hard evidence for the “rules” that were taught. So Allesina and Cody Weinberger, a University of Chicago undergraduate, gathered hundreds of writing suggestions from scientific literature and condensed them into “Ten Simple Rules,” including “Keep it short,” “Keep it simple,” “Signal novelty and importance,” and “Show confidence.”
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
Ten Simple (Empirical) Rules for Writing Science by Cody J. Weinberger, James A. Evans, & Stefano Allesina. PLOS Published: April 30, 2015 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004205
This is an open access journal.
From the paper (Note: Links have been removed),
Scientists receive (and offer) much advice on how to write an effective paper that their colleagues will read, cite, and celebrate [2–15]. Fundamentally, the advice is similar to that given to journalists: keep the text short, simple, bold, and easy to understand. Many resources recommend the parsimonious use of adjectives and adverbs, the use of present tense, and a consistent style. Here we put this advice to the test, and measure the impact of certain features of academic writing on success, as proxied by citations.
The abstract epitomizes the scientific writing style, and many journals force their authors to follow a formula—including a very strict word-limit, a specific organization into paragraphs, and even the articulation of particular sentences and claims (e.g., “Here we show that…”).
For our analysis, we collected more than one million abstracts from eight disciplines, spanning 17 years. The disciplines were chosen so that biology was represented by three allied fields (Ecology, Evolution, and Genetics). We drew upon a wide range of comparison disciplines, namely Analytic Chemistry, Condensed Matter Physics, Geology, Mathematics, and Psychology (see table in S1 Text). We measured whether certain features of the abstract consistently led to more (or fewer) citations than expected, after accounting for other factors that certainly influence citations, such as article age (S1 Fig), number of authors and references, and the journal in which it was published.
Here are some of the results (from the paper),
We find that shorter abstracts (fewer words [R1a] and fewer sentences [R1b]) consistently lead to fewer citations, with short sentences (R2) being beneficial only in Mathematics and Physics. Similarly, using more (rather than fewer) adjectives and adverbs is beneficial (R5). Also, writing an abstract with fewer common (R3a) or easy (R3b) words results in more citations.
The use of the present tense (R4) is beneficial in Biology and Psychology, while it has a negative impact in Chemistry and Physics, possibly reflecting differences in disciplinary culture.
While matching the keywords (R6) leads to universally negative outcomes, signaling the novelty and importance of the work (R7) has positive effects. The use of superlatives (R8) is also positive, while avoiding “hedge” words is negative in Biology and Physics, but positive in Chemistry.
Finally, choosing “pleasant,” “active,” and “easy to imagine” words (R10) has positive effects across the board.
The issue the researchers particularized from the results may not be what you expect (from the paper),
… Despite the fact that anybody in their right mind would prefer to read short, simple, and well-written prose with few abstruse terms, when building an argument and writing a paper, the limiting step is the ability to find the right article. For this, scientists rely heavily on search techniques, especially search engines, where longer and more specific abstracts are favored. Longer, more detailed, prolix prose is simply more available for search. This likely explains our results, and suggests the new landscape of linguistic fitness in 21st century science. …
It seems to me that while prolix prose’s popularity, predtaing search engines and the internet, is now being reinforced by our digital media. In short, while there are many complaints about digital media and shortened attention spans, it seems that in some cases digital media is encouraging wordiness.
Litigation and research
A May 1, 2015 posting by Michael Halpern for the Guardian science blogs sheds light on some legal tactics that lend themselves quite well to intimidating science researchers (Note: Links have been removed),
In 2009, a law firm representing Philip Morris submitted freedom of information requests to the University of Stirling for the work of three scientists – Gerard Hastings, Anne Marie Mackintosh and Linda Bauld – who were studying the impact of tobacco marketing on adolescents. They sought all primary data, questionnaires, handbooks and documents related to the researchers’ work, much of which was confidential.
Although the requests were eventually dropped due to negative publicity, responding to and challenging them cost the scientists and the university’s lawyers many weeks of work. “The stress of all this is considerable,” the scientists involved, wrote afterwards. “We are not lawyers and, like most civilians, find the law abstruse and the overt threat of serious punishment extremely disconcerting.”
This was no isolated incident. Activists and corporations of all political stripes in a growing number of countries are increasingly harassing and intimidating university scientists, using public information laws which were originally designed for citizens to understand the workings of government.
In an editorial in this week’s Science magazine, climate scientist Michael Mann and I explore this problem and ask a pressing question: how do we balance public accountability with the privacy essential for scientific inquiry?
The post is well worth reading in its entirety as Halpern goes on to describe the situation in more detail.
