Interlude: Credibility, Isolated Pronouns, and Open Grants

Here's my latest curated round-up of the best tips, tools, and resources on scientific and medical writing.

💌 Round-up

💻 From My Desk

3 Phrases That Can Damage Your Credibility in Research
Good credibility goes hand in hand with good science. But vague language can undermine your logic and erode confidence in your work. Learn how three vague phrases—"little is known," "to our knowledge," and "first to show"—can damage your credibility in research.

How Isolated Pronouns Create More Work for Readers
Isolated pronouns ask readers to either reread the previous sentence or carry the cognitive load of that sentence into the next sentence. Learn how pairing an isolated pronoun with a verb can add clarity that guides your reader through your writing.

👓 Reading

Do research articles with more readable abstracts receive higher online attention? Evidence from Science
"Results showed that abstract readability is significantly related to the online attention RAs [research articles] receive, and that this relationship is significantly affected by discipline and publication time." 

Pressure in a Pandemic: Lessons for Communicating Scientific Research
This article describes how authors can help to better address communication challenges exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The valuable tips and perspectives can help you "...ensure your publications are timely, understandable, relevant, and inclusive across all therapy areas and audiences."

Autocorrect errors in Excel still creating genomics headache
"A 2016 analysis found that 20% of papers featuring gene names had errors created by spreadsheet autocorrect functions, but a bigger survey now finds the proportion is up to 30%. Since 2014, the number of papers with errors has increased significantly." 

More women than ever are starting careers in science
"Women are more likely to start a research career now than they were 20 years ago, reveals a longitudinal study of the publishing records of millions of researchers around the world. But they are less likely to continue their academic careers than are their male contemporaries, and in general publish fewer papers."

‘Tortured phrases’ give away fabricated research papers
"...these strange terms — which they dub 'tortured phrases' — are probably the result of automated translation or software that attempts to disguise plagiarism.... Preliminary probes show that several thousands of papers with tortured phrases are indexed in major databases...[and] other tortured phrases related to the concepts of other scientific fields are yet to be exposed.”

🧰 Tools

Open Grants
This website shares examples of grant proposals written by researchers at various stages of their careers. The examples include funded and not funded proposals that cover a variety of fields and grant types (eg, NIH, NSF, foundations). You can explore their examples and share some of your own.

💬 Quote

"A statement is persuasive and credible either because it is directly self-evident or because it appears to be proved from other statements that are so." ― Aristotle

Thank you so much for reading.

Warmly,

Crystal