Interlude: Writing Groups, Research Integrity, and Plain Language
Here's my latest curated round-up of the best tips, tools, and resources on scientific and medical writing.
💌 Round-up
🎉 Featured
Plain Language – Pacemaker, AMWA Northern California Chapter
"During the annual membership meeting in February, our Chapter members were treated to an enthusiastic presentation from Crystal Herron, PhD, ELS about plain language and its positive effect on readability. Herron's passion for clear, direct communication was evident in her presentation. When it ended, I was energized about putting plain language practices into my daily work."
💻 From My Desk
7 Great Reasons to Start a Writing Group
Writing is often a solitary practice. But continually connecting with other writers can be immensely helpful for your writing process. Here are 7 excellent reasons why you need to establish and regularly meet with a writing group.
Describe Action with the Right Preposition: By vs With
In scientific and medical writing, some authors will use the prepositions by and with interchangeably. Although both words show how something can be done, they have different meanings that boil down to who or what did the action.
📆 Upcoming
Scientific Writing Masterclass - Starts February 2022
As researchers advance in their careers, they often shift from doing research to writing about research. Yet, many researchers have not had any formal training in writing. To help researchers learn key skills for writing effectively, I am starting a Scientific Writing Masterclass in February 2022. Apply now to transform your writing into clear, concise, and compelling grants, manuscripts, and more.
👓 Reading
Integrating the patient voice into plain language summaries
"The PFMD guide strongly encourages patient input at every stage of PLS development, including selecting which publications are most suitable to develop summaries for, planning the content of PLS, and writing them."
Researchers urge funders and institutions to crack down on false investigators
"...researchers who listed false investigators on grant applications attracted 70% more funding...[but] the latest analysis found that adding false investigators does not affect the chance of individual grant proposals being accepted. It’s likely that those who list false investigators attract more funds because in the long run they tend to submit more grant proposals overall, the new study found."
Female authorship of covid-19 research in manuscripts submitted to 11 biomedical journals: cross sectional study
"The low rates of female first, last, and corresponding authorship on submissions may fall further as the pandemic continues to cause disruption to working patterns and may be compounded once the new research that was conceived and designed during the pandemic flows through to publication stage. Thus, our findings should give early warning of inequity to those who rely on authorship of published articles as a metric of productivity to inform academic promotion and award research grants."
Systematic review and meta-analyses of studies analysing instructions to authors from 1987 to 2017
"...six factors that explain a substantial part of the wide heterogeneity we found between journals’ coverage of...research integrity topics [include]: (1) time (year when the instructions were applicable), (2) country (in which the journals were published), (3) database (in which the journals were indexed), (4) impact factor, (5) scholarly discipline, and (6) sub-discipline."
ResearchGate pulls 200,000 files from its site, amid publisher pressure
"...the online platform has started implementing a new system called Jarvis, which matches publisher rights information with user content when articles are uploaded. Jarvis can prevent a researcher from uploading content to ResearchGate that cannot be freely shared. The site is urging authors to comply with any licence terms or restrictions when uploading their content."
🧰 Tools
Academic Phrasebank
This database is a gold mine of phrases commonly used in manuscripts, proposals, dissertations, and more. Whether you're struggling with finding the right words for a transition, reporting results, or describing trends, this database organizes phrases by type and section to help you find the best phrase to use in your writing.
💬 Quote
"Writers tend to be so paranoid about talking about their writing...But it can help a great deal if you have someone you can call when you need a pep talk, someone you have learned to trust, someone who is honest and generous and who won't jinx you." – Anne Lamott
Thank you so much for reading.
Warmly,
Crystal
