GeoVerbiage

This blog covers mostly reviewing papers, and a bit on writing papers.  But a post I saw in Facebook requires a discussion about reading scientific papers.  I covered this a little bit under "reviewing", but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to weigh in a bit more. There is a wonderful column from Science  that is worth linking to:   column here I remember those days. First, not all scientific articles are so bad.  But some surely are.  A lesson to be gained from reading such papers is how not  to write! Second, to my astonishment, almost 30 years after its publication, people still seem to be using my book, Understanding Paleoclimate from the pre-Quaternary Geologic Record  (Columbia University Press).  It is badly out of date.  It was partly out of date the day it appeared.  So why isn't it being completely ignored now?  I think it's because I have never fallen into the temptation of trying to sound erudite.  To...

Bearing in mind that this blog is mostly directed at grad students, postdocs, and earlier-career professionals, I pick up here on some of my thoughts about writing.  Writing a scientific paper is one of those things that we should have been taught systematically, but often were not.  Often it's kind of hit or miss; we pick things up along the way, during thesis revision, etc.  So if you are feeling a bit uncertain about some aspects of writing, this blog will help, I hope. One of the things you have almost certainly been taught, or already picked up on, is that scientific papers are expected to have a certain form of organization.  The basic elements are Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion.  In geology, if the length of the paper makes it easier, we commonly have a section titled "Previous Work" between the Introduction and the Methods.  We also may have a separate section for "Conclusions", which follows the Discussion.   I th...

You've all heard about shingling and what it is.  As a reviewer, you can be very helpful to the editor by pointing out that a paper is a shingle.  Keep in mind that, even in specialty journals, the editors may come from a wide variety of backgrounds and may not be familiar with all aspects of the literature.  At high-load journals, it may be very difficult if not impossible for the editors to do the legwork--which can take a couple of hours or more per paper--to figure out if a paper is a shingle, so they really are dependent on the reviewers. Before I start, though, let me define shingling for those of you who might not be that familiar with the concept.  Shingling is publishing basically the same paper as one you've published before, but with some new data added, resulting in, at best, a mere expansion of already-reached conclusions. Not all papers that have new data added to old data are shingles.  I have seen many papers that add new data to previous wor...

This post is in response to a couple more reader queries.  To paraphrase, the queries were: (1) If I can't understand a paper, how do I know it's the author's fault or my lack of comprehension? (2) How do I tell the difference between things I as a reviewer think the paper should have done, either by necessity or to meet standards (mine, the authors', or the journal's) versus general betterment of the work?  (1)  Aside from the case of poor English, which was addressed in Reviewing #8, there are a couple of reasons this might happen.  One is if you were sent a paper that is so far outside of your expertise you cannot possibly give it a critical review.  It happens, but I do think reviewers sometimes turn down invitations too quickly on this basis.  Most authors want their audience to be larger than the handful of people in their specialty, so having reviewers who aren't in the center of a particular field can be very useful to editors.  But ...

Note:  Since writing the essay below, I've learned that it is considered rude in some quarters to suggest that a paper be read by a native English speaker because it makes the assumption that the author is not a native.  I think this criticism is a bit off base because if you have any sensitivity to how various non-native English speakers speak English, it's pretty easy to pick up on what their native language is--even with seeing their names.  Having said that, the more tactful approach would be to point out that it is not in idiomatic English and ask the author to edit it accordingly.  Then it's up to the author to figure out what to do. If editors were paid, I'd just suggest the editors do the necessary editing, but they usually aren't, so that' a big ask.  Of course, if the English is so poor that a paper cannot be understood, then the reviewer/editor has no choice but to point that out (this goes for native English speakers, too, by the way).  If you a...

This post is in response to a reader query (restated slightly from the original comment):   How do you decide when (as an author) to just submit to a different journal instead of making major revisions, and is this is ok? I took this to mean that the editor has asked for major revisions, rather than rejecting your work ("major revisions" would include decisions like "reject--invite resubmission"). The short is answer is, of course it's OK--you can do whatever you want with your work.  There is nothing unethical about submitting to another journal.  It would be considered courteous to inform the editor of this, although not necessary. Further developing this response, however, the answer is actually complex because it kind of depends on what major revisions are being asked for. Major revision may be requested on two broad bases, or a combination of the two.  One might be called technical and the other might be called editorial.  I'll address the latter...

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