Among the many ways in which journals differ in the way they expect authors to format references is the way names of journals are given-whether spelt out in full or abbreviated (Current Science versus Curr. Sci., for example). The abbreviations may also be different - journal being shortened to simply J or to Jnl - but, fortunately, are practically standardized now. This post offers some tips on dealing with the abbreviations.

Look up references in a recent issue of the target journal. In most cases, authors of papers published in your target journal will have already cited the journal title that you need to abbreviate. Examine a few published papers on the same topic published in the target journal to see if the journal title in question is listed and use the same abbreviation.

Look up the websites of abstracting and indexing services. Because abstracting and indexing services cover thousands of journals and typically abbreviate their names, websites of Chemical Abstracts (publishers of CASSI, or the Chemical Abstracts Service Source Index) [1] and BIOSIS (BIOSIS Serial Sources) are likely to include the journal title you are looking for.

Another comprehensive source is ‘All That JAS', or Journal Abbreviation Sources [2], which points visitors to Internet resources, organized by disciplines (from Agriculture and Anthropology to Religion and Veterinary Medicine) that provide full titles of journals and abbreviations of those titles.

Abbreviate the title from the standard abbreviations of its constituent words. If you wish to abbreviate Malaysian Journal of Oncology, for example, and cannot find the title, you can build up the abbreviation using Malay. for Malaysian, J. for journal, and Oncol. for Oncology because this is how these words are abbreviated according to ISSN. Standard abbreviations for common words are available at the ISSN website: http://www.issn.org/2-22661-LTWA-online.php.

Do not abbreviate single-word titles. Names of journals that run to only one word - Nature and Science, to cite two famous examples - are not abbreviated.

Match the target journal's style for abbreviations. Journals differ in whether they end the abbreviated words with a dot, whether they print the abbreviated titles in italics, and whether they capitalize every significant word in the title. Examine the style used by your target journal and follow that.

[1] http://cassi.cas.org/search.jsp   

[2] http://www.abbreviations.com/jas.asp

["Publish and prosper" is a series of posts about tips for researchers whose first language is not English but who submit papers to journals published in English. The series touches upon not only writing (spelling, grammar, punctuation, usage, and style) but everything else relevant to publishing research papers that journal editors wish their authors knew.]

Tags: abbreviations, explaining abbreviations, journal name abbreviations, journal title abbreviations, Publish and Prosper

It is not every day that you write, or even work on, a research paper; however, you probably write e-mail messages every day, and many of them are important for your research. This post discusses the importance of writing good subject-lines for your e-mail messages.

Subject-lines are the equivalent to titles of research papers: just as you scan the titles of papers before deciding whether to read one, your correspondents will scan the subject-lines of e-mail messages in their in-boxes before deciding whether to click open a message, especially when it is from a stranger. This is why it is important that you write the subject- lines of your messages carefully. Here are a few tips.

Always use a subject-line. A blank subject-line typically suggests spam mail; such a message may not even make it to the in-box of your correspondent. Not using a subject-line is like not giving a title to your document. A good subject-line, on the other hand, may prompt your correspondent to read your message.

Keep the subject-line short. Short subject-lines will be displayed in full in the in-boxes. Kim Harrison, for good reasons, suggests an upper limit of 40 characters besides offering many other helpful tips in his article [1] titled "Carefully crafted email subject lines are vital for effective communication."

Avoid words or phrases or characters that are common in spam mails. Words such as cash benefits, dollars, or money; labels such as urgent, personal, and appeal; and characters such as the dollar sign and the exclamation mark - especially multiple exclamation marks - are often suspect and trigger ‘spam filters'. Also avoid writing subject-lines entirely in capital letters.

Use unique and informative subject-lines. Good subject-lines are specific: compare "Meeting today" and "Discussion on research budgets: 4 Jan. 2012 at 4 p.m.," and you will see for yourself the impact of specific subject-lines.

[1] http://www.cuttingedgepr.com/articles/carefully-crafted-email-subject-lines-effective-communication.asp

["Publish and prosper" is a series of posts about tips for researchers whose first language is not English but who submit papers to journals published in English. The series touches upon not only writing (spelling, grammar, punctuation, usage, and style) but everything else relevant to publishing research papers that journal editors wish their authors knew.]

Tags: emails; subject line

English has many pairs of words that sound alike but are spelt differently and mean different things: there / their, hear / here, write / right, no / know, and new / knew, for example. These words are homophones (homo in Greek means the same and phone in Greek means sound or voice). One such pair is lose / loose, and the two words are far more often mistaken for each other because they also look more alike. However, the difference between them is quite clear cut.

To begin with, lose is a verb whereas loose is an adjective: if you lose weight, your trousers may become loose for you. If a part is loose, it may drop off and will be lost. The noun form of to lose is loss: a business makes a loss if it continues to lose money.

In technical writing, loose is usually associated with physical objects: loose-fitting clothes, nuts that are loose because they are not tightened properly, and a loose-leaf notebook from which single sheets can be removed easily.

One way to ensure that you use the right word is to remember the opposites of the two words: lose is the opposite of gain; loose is the opposite of tight; see which is the correct antonym, and you will always choose correctly between loose and lose.  

["Publish and prosper" is a series of posts about tips for researchers whose first language is not English but who submit papers to journals published in English. The series touches upon not only writing (spelling, grammar, punctuation, usage, and style) but everything else relevant to publishing research papers that journal editors wish their authors knew.]

Tags: confusable words, Homophones, improving writing skills, Publish and Prosper, Word choice

Science and technology have extended our sense of vision: a microscope allows us to see objects so small that they are invisible to the naked eye; a telescope does the same for distant objects. In biology, selective staining helps us see objects clearly by improving colour contrast. Column chromatography goes one step ahead: it makes those differences visible when the properties in question have no optical counterpart at all in nature. All these are techniques that make something visible-but whether they allow us to visualize something depends not on the techniques but on our imagination: a line chart helps us visualize what the data mean, a flow diagram helps us visualize a process, and a route map helps us visualize the path we want to take.

Therefore, avoid writing "differences between the DNA samples were visualized by means of gel electrophoresis" (yet another technique) when you mean "differences between the DNA samples were made visible using gel electrophoresis." Or avoid writing "the spores were visualized using trypan blue" (trypan blue is a stain) when you mean "the spores were made visible using trypan blue" (in fact, you can write "the spores were stained with trypan blue" because it is understood that the purpose of staining is to make an object visible).

["Publish and prosper" is a series of posts about tips for researchers whose first language is not English but who submit papers to journals published in English. The series touches upon not only writing (spelling, grammar, punctuation, usage, and style) but everything else relevant to publishing research papers that journal editors wish their authors knew.]

Tags: confusable words, explanatory writing, improving writing skills, Publish and Prosper, Word choice

When no journal ever allows its authors to specify the font in which their papers are eventually printed, the relevance of this post may not be immediately clear. However, researchers also write letters and project proposals and project reports and print out drafts of their research papers-and do not have to use Times New Roman or even Calibri, which is now the default font in Microsoft Word. Why should they care? Well, they should care because the choice can make a difference to the ease with which documents can be read, whether printed on paper on read off a monitor. After all, Times New Roman was designed nearly 80 years ago and that too for The Times of London and therefore, among other requirements, had to be compact and suitable for printing on newsprint- our requirements are somewhat different.

Incidentally, Times New Roman, Calibri, Comic Sans, and many others are typefaces, not fonts, although the distinction is seldom observed by users (and will be ignored here from now on). Arial, for example, is a typeface: 12-point Arial Bold is a font; a font is thus a specific instance of a typeface whereas a typeface is about the design of individual letters, numerals, and other symbols which stay more or less constant across different sizes and styles (bold, italics, and small capitals). Such niceties aside, here are some factors you should consider in choosing a font,

Does the font have all the symbols I need? Different fonts are developed to meet different needs. A font developed for printing fairytales, for example, has no need for Greek letters and mathematical signs anymore than a font for printing mathematics needs emoticons.

Will I be circulating the document widely? It is best to stick to fonts that come bundled with the operating systems if you plan to circulate the document and expect those who receive it to print it out. This is also true of PowerPoint presentations. If the font you have used is not installed on another machine, a substitute will be used instead and the two versions may not match page for page or line for line, and tables and figures may shift.

Will the document be read mostly on the screen? Georgia and Verdana, for example, were especially developed for screen reading. Try changing the text of a document you are reading on screen from Times New Roman to Georgia, and you will see the difference.

Do I wish to signal a particular tone? Formal documents such as project reports and business letters need to convey a formal tone, and some fonts are just right for the job (Constantia, for instance) but if you are designing a poster, you may want to consider other options.

Does every character need to be completely clear? Using Arial, for instance, it is not easy to tell apart a lowercase ‘ell' from an uppercase ‘eye'. In printing address labels, the choice of font is critical (postal codes, for instance, need to distinguish between a zero and the letter O). If you are giving URLs, the character string has to be unambiguous because context does not provide a clue.

Why not experiment with a number of fonts and see what works best for you?

["Publish and prosper" is a series of posts about tips for researchers whose first language is not English but who submit papers to journals published in English. The series touches upon not only writing (spelling, grammar, punctuation, usage, and style) but everything else relevant to publishing research papers that journal editors wish their authors knew.]

Tags: choice of fonts, font, fonts, fonts for reading off computer monitors, fonts for scientific documents, identifying fonts, Publish and Prosper

Published research papers often include figures (illustrations) and tables to support the text. Electronic publishing also allows for supplementary or archived figures and tables, which do not appear in the printed paper but are available for viewing or downloading. However, the journey of an approved manuscript - approved for publication by the reviewers, that is - from being a group of files (the text of the paper as one file and each of the accompanying figures and tables as separate files) to its final published form is often delayed because of simple oversight: the author mentions, say, four figures in the text but attaches fewer or more. The copy editor therefore has to go back to the author for clarification, either requesting for the missing figure or figures or asking how to account for the extra figures: do they need to be mentioned in the text (if the author meant to include them but forgot to mention them) or should they be simply deleted (if the author sent them by mistake).

A common reason for such mismatches is extensive revision, usually prompted by reviewers. The reviewers may have suggested that parts of the manuscript be removed, which may involve removing the corresponding figures as well and renumbering the rest if required. On the other hand, the reviewers' comments may require the author to add more matter, with additional figures, which the author may inadvertently forget to include along with the revised text of the paper.  

Good housekeeping is therefore necessary. It is best to re-check the final version looking for such oversight: use the ‘find' feature of the word-processing package to look for "figure" and "table" - or Figure or Fig. or any other form - to locate every mention and highlight such mention with a bright colour. Look at the corresponding figure or table to make sure that it is the right one. If submitting a printout, include a line of text, saying something like "Insert Figure/Table here" in the printout. While using the "Find" feature, make the search case insensitive (which ensures that both Figure and figure or Fig. and fig. are found) and search for the whole word (which excludes such words as figuring, figuratively, and figurine). Incidentally, make sure that your usage of these words is not only consistent but also matches the style used by your target journal.

["Publish and prosper" is a series of posts about tips for researchers whose first language is not English but who submit papers to journals published in English. The series touches upon not only writing (spelling, grammar, punctuation, usage, and style) but everything else relevant to publishing research papers that journal editors wish their authors knew.]

Tags: Figures, mentioning figures, numbering figures, numbering tables, Publish and Prosper

Writing is so central to research that books on writing about research, especially those devoted to teaching scientists how to write, continue to be published. It is neither necessary nor practical for readers of this blog to read every new book about scientific writing because most such books say little that is different or original. What sets such books apart, other than the writer's tone and style, is the way each of them approaches the topic. I have chosen to write about David Lindsay's Scientific Writing = Thinking in Words [1]—yes, the title features the equals sign—because it may appeal to readers of this blog: it addresses "many of the aspects of scientific writing from the viewpoint of non-native English speaking authors" and emphasises that "they are not as disadvantaged as they perhaps may think. The language of science which conveys logic and reasoning, is independent of the language in which it happens to be expressed. Since the primary goal of good scientific writing is to communicate good science, non-native English speakers who are good scientists have all the tools they need to write well although they may need some help eventually to tidy it up for publication in English-language journals."

The second strength of the book is that it has been shaped by the author's first-hand experience of conducting workshops during which the participants "applied concepts about thinking and reasoning to the task of converting ideas and experimental data into focused articles for publication. [The participants] came from many countries and spoke many languages."

Thirdly, the book is full of practical advice. For instance, difficulty in getting started on writing is a major obstacle but Lindsay shows how to overcome it: "The first step in getting started is to realise that your problem is not so much how you are going to start, but how you are going to finish. You would never knowingly set out on a major voyage without knowing your destination."

A particular strength of the book is its analysis of seven stumbling blocks to good writing and how to remove them during the critical stage of revising your writing. The seven blocks are as follows (each is illustrated with several examples, followed by succinct advice on how to overcome the block): (1) clusters of nouns, (2) complex adjectival phrases, (3) sentences beginning with subordinate clauses, (4) nouns instead of the verbs from which they are derived, (5) use of imprecise words, (6) use of acronyms, unfamiliar abbreviations and (7) symbols, and citations, footnotes, asides in parentheses and other distractions. I do not quite agree that the last one is a stumbling block in research papers though, but its inclusion may explain why the book is free of citations and references. But this is a minor quibble, and I will urge the readers of this blog to explore the book.

[1] Lindsay D. 2011. Scientific Writing = Thinking in Words. Collingwood, Victoria, Australia: CSIRO Publishing. 122 

["Publish and prosper" is a series of posts about tips for researchers whose first language is not English but who submit papers to journals published in English. The series touches upon not only writing (spelling, grammar, punctuation, usage, and style) but everything else relevant to publishing research papers that journal editors wish their authors knew.]

Tags: David Lindsay, Publish and Prosper, Scientific Writing, thinking in words, writing research papers, writing research papers / 研究論文執筆

Headings or headlines are a special kind of text and are not as rigidly governed by conventions of punctuation. In particular, whenever a heading is on a separate line (the text that follows the heading starts on the next line below the heading), it is pointless to end it with a colon or a full stop. The Publications Office of the European Union [1] puts the matter succinctly: "Do not use colons at the end of headings or to introduce a table or graph set in text matter."

Such punctuation does not help readers; in fact, it has been shown to affect comprehension. A study that specifically addressed this point found that headlines that ended in a full stop lowered comprehension [2]. As Darren Rowse puts it [3], "Full stops, like their name suggests, are something that halts the eye of your reader. . . . [whereas] titles are all about leading your reader into your post."

However, minor headings are sometimes followed by full stops or colons, but only when they are "run on" (text continues on the same line immediately after the heading). Even then, the punctuation can be dispensed with if the headings are set in bold or italics. This, however, is a matter of style: if your target journal uses colons or full stops after such headings, you should do the same.

[1] Publications Office, European Union. [no date]. House rules for the preparation of the text. <http://publications.europa.eu/ code/en/en-4100100en.htm>

[2] Harrison K. [no date]. Bringing a headline to a full stop. <www.cuttingedgepr.com/ article/coreprskills_headline_to_full_stop.asp>

[3] Rowse D. 2006. Full stops (periods) in titles. <www.problogger.net/ archives/2006/09/26/full-stops-periods-in-titles>   

["Publish and prosper" is a series of posts about tips for researchers whose first language is not English but who submit papers to journals published in English. The series touches upon not only writing (spelling, grammar, punctuation, usage, and style) but everything else relevant to publishing research papers that journal editors wish their authors knew.]

Tags: heading levels, Publish and Prosper, punctuation marks, Punctutation, style for headings

Two earlier posts in this series discussed some ways to search the Internet more efficiently, namely enclosing phrases in double quotes [1] and searching for specific file types [2]. This post takes a different approach, focusing not on the contents of web pages but on their providers.

As a researcher, you are more likely to trust research, academic, and educational institutes more than you trust commercial entities. Even if we keep the matter of trust aside and consider relevance, you are likely to find web pages hosted by research institutes more relevant to your needs than those hosted by other entities.

It is simple enough to express this preference in a search-all you need to do is to combine the search terms with, for example, site:.ac (type the word site followed by a colon, a dot, and the domain name ac; do not insert a space anywhere). This restricts the source of web pages to the domain ac (for academic).

Depending on what you are searching for, you can similarly restrict your searchers to .gov so that the sources will only be governmental organizations in the United States, including both the federal government and state and local governments; to .edu for educational institutes in the United States; to .org for organizations anywhere (typically non-commercial); and so on.

[1] http://blog.editage.com/?q=make-web-searches-more-precise-insert-double-...

[2] http://blog.editage.com/?q=make-web-searches-more-precise-2

["Publish and prosper" is a series of posts about tips for researchers whose first language is not English but who submit papers to journals published in English. The series touches upon not only writing (spelling, grammar, punctuation, usage, and style) but everything else relevant to publishing research papers that journal editors wish their authors knew.]

Tags: advanced search, Internet searchers, search engines, searching the Internet

Examine the following two sets of examples, one with commas and the other without them.

(a) a fertile, well-drained, and level piece of land; (b) a large, nocturnal, and furry rodent; (c) a shiny, hard, smooth, and thick layer

(a) the cheapest technically feasible solution, (b) a locally grown early-maturing cultivar

What the two sets of examples have in common is that both consist of phrases that end in a noun, which is described by a string of adjectives before the noun. Yet, the adjectives in one set are separated by commas; the adjectives in the second set are not. Why?

In the first set, each adjective qualifies the noun separately or independently-the piece of land is fertile, it is well-drained, and it is level; the rodent is large and nocturnal and furry; the layer is thick, smooth, hard, and shiny. In a string of such adjectives, sometimes referred to as coordinate adjectives, you can re-arrange the adjectives (list them in a different order), replace every comma that separates two adjacent adjectives with and, and yet produce a phrase that means the same as the original and does not sound odd.  

In the second set, the examples cannot be reworded and re-arranged so easily without affecting the meaning or without sounding odd because two adjacent adjectives form a unit. Often, each adjective or a pair of adjectives modifies not just the noun but the rest of the noun phrase. In the first example, cheapest modifies technically feasible solution and technically feasible modifies solution but "a technically feasible cheapest solution" or "a cheapest and technically and feasible solution" is neither idiomatic nor correct. In the second example, locally and grown form one unit, while early and maturing form another; The first unit modifies the second.

["Publish and prosper" is a series of posts about tips for researchers whose first language is not English but who submit papers to journals published in English. The series touches upon not only writing (spelling, grammar, punctuation, usage, and style) but everything else relevant to publishing research papers that journal editors wish their authors knew.]

Tags: coordinate adjectives, hierarchical adjectives, when not to use the comma between adjectives, when to use the comma between adjectives