“Academics – especially more senior ones – should be generous with authorships” is something you hear pretty often. As it happens, “Academics – especially more senior ones – should be generous with authorships” is also something I say pretty often. And you might think this is evidence that I’m nicely in step with the times – but you’d be wrong.
The thing is, I think I mean something quite different by “generous with authorships” than a lot of folks do. Continue reading
Last week, over on Dynamic Ecology, Jeremy made passing reference to a blog post title contravening Betteridge’s Law – that is, the generalization that when a media headline asks a question, the answer is always “no”. Which reminded me that I’ve always been curious about Betteridge’s Law in the context of scientific papers (in that context, it’s sometimes called Hinchliffe’s Rule instead). When you use a question title for your scientific paper, is the answer always (or usually) “no”?
Well, let’s start with an easier question. Continue reading
Ok, not that kind of Introduction.
I’ve mentioned before that I find the Introduction the hardest part of a scientific paper to write. I know I’m not alone. It’s easy to wander, or to stuff in everything you know that’s even remotely relevant, or (especially if you’re me) to simply get paralyzed and write nothing at all. Developing writers often have particular trouble, and since I’ve worked with a lot of them over my career, I’ve tried hard to figure out what sends them (and me!) astray, and what can get them (and me!) back on track. I have a theory about the former, and a couple of tricks that help a lot with the latter.
First, what makes Introductions so hard? Continue reading
Every few months I inflict upon you my weird fascination with the etymology of Latin names. It’s been almost 5 months since I rhapsodized about Loncovilius carlsbergi, so it’s time. Today: a quartet of newly described spiders whose names please me for reasons I can’t quite enunciate.
Meet Utivarachna angsoduo, U. balonku, U. rimba, and U. trisula. All four were described and named this month by Naufal Urfi Dhiya’ulhaq and colleagues, from collections made in Sumatran rainforest canopy. Perhaps you aren’t a huge spider fan, but surely you have to admit these are handsome creatures.* But what about their names? Continue reading
Over the last few weeks, there’s been a small flood of cases where a published paper turns out to have clear fingerprints of its authors’ use of ChatGPT (or other so-called “artificial intelligence” tools). By “fingerprints” I don’t mean the kind of odd-but-acceptable phrasing ChatGPT sometimes comes up with. I mean laugh-out-loud ridiculous things like the rat with the enormous AI penis, or the paper with a Discussion including this gem:
In summary, the management of bilateral iatrogenic I’m very sorry, but I don’t have access to real-time information or patient-specific data, as I am an AI language model…
If you’ve missed out and want to see more examples, there are brief summaries here, here, and here. Continue reading
OK, it isn’t really, but I enjoyed seeing Dynamic Ecology say so.
A couple of weeks ago I argued here that it’s effective, and thus desirable, to end the Introduction of a scientific paper with a brief statement of your main result. But I also admitted that this isn’t universally held opinion; in fact, I’ve always suspected that preferring papers written that way puts me in the minority. I’m happy to report that I can now do more than “suspect”.
The fine folks at Dynamic Ecology did what I probably should have done: polled their readers. Here’s the breakdown: Continue reading
Like a lot of people, I’ve been watching with great curiosity the rapid development and deployment of “artificial intelligence” tools like ChatGPT. (I’ve been writing about them a fair bit too, most recently for a chapter in my new book on teaching scientific writing.) To my mind, what’s even more fascinating than the capability of these tools is seeing people badly, repeatedly, and predictably misunderstand what they are and what they can do. And I think we can trace a lot of that to terminology. “Artificial intelligence” is simply the wrong term for these tools, and applying it has gotten a lot of people in a lot of trouble.
I think the term is wrong twice, actually. Continue reading
Last week, I suggested that readers are well served if the Introduction of a scientific paper includes a short statement of the main result. But I also acknowledged that this may be more of a preference than a bulletproof argument. And sure enough, several readers chimed in to say that I’m wrong. (Well, that’s the polite word for it, and some of them used it).
Anyway, if you’d like to have your 2 cents worth, over at Dynamic Ecology they’ve got a poll running. I made a guess that sentiment would run about 3:1 against me – now we’ll find out! Go vote.
© Stephen Heard March 4, 2024
UPDATE: here are the results, and wow, are they ever all over the map!
I just gave a little workshop in a university course on creative writing – something that high-school me would have thought about as unlikely as my winning the World Series MVP trophy.* But why me? I was there, somewhat surprisingly, to talk about “creative nonfiction”.
Among readers of Scientist Sees Squirrel, there are surely many who know all about “creative nonfiction”, could define it, and could recognize it when they read it. But there are surely also many like me: puzzled that there could even be such a thing, and confused about what it might be, if there was. Or at least, that was me a couple of years ago. Taking myself from the second group to the first taught me something important about writing – or at least, forced me to realize that I knew it. Continue reading
It will not surprise you that, over the course of a 30-year career in science, I’ve read a lot of scientific papers. Over the same span I’ve also read a lot of mystery novels.* As a result of this exhaustive research, I can tell you this: they are not the same.
I know, you aren’t surprised by that. Nobody is. Except for folks who give a certain kind of advice about constructing the Introduction section of a paper, and I find this curious. Let me explain. Continue reading
Scientist Sees Squirrel 