Visual communication has both a verbal component – usually visual presentation of the written word – and an illustrative component such as drawings, diagrams, photos, and charts. Although both elements have long received attention in the context of the primary research article, scientific writing instruction has tended to treat other avenues of visual communication as a relatively minor afterthought. The implicit assumption has been that oral presentations and posters, for example, involve only minor repackaging of a written document and its supporting graphics. In recent years, however, this assumption has been challenged by new developments that have increased the status of visual communication and given it a surprisingly powerful role to play in modern scientific exchanges.

First, there is an increased understanding that when people look at a visual pattern, they process it differently than text (Gurak, 2000). Humans read each word of text and decipher it, but they quickly and efficiently perceive visual information as a unit. (How many times have you tried to assemble something and after puzzling over the written instructions, found yourself turning to the diagram?)

Second, communication has become increasingly international, with the outcome that science and technology must be accessible to people across a variety of languages. The use of symbols rather than written words can make concepts understandable around the world. At the same time, web publishing has given visual communication much greater force and international presence.

Like Charles Darwin, most of us need to go over our writing to disentangle confusion, particularly in word choice, syntax, and style. Syntax refers to the relationships between the words and other elements in a sentence. Style means the way something is done, or its basic “personality.” Thus we speak of a scientific writing style characterized by clarity and organization, an editorial style that presents written material in a certain way, or a typographic style with various artistic elements.

The importance of these three aspects of scientific writing springs from the precision which science requires. More than one interpretation of a sentence or phrase is unacceptable, so careful attention must be paid to both word choice and word arrangement.

This step may have been what you have been expecting – and dreading – from the start. Admittedly, it can be hard work, but stick with us.

CHAPTER 1

Exercise 1.1. Search strategy and Boolean logic (page 10)

1. A, H, J

2. B, E, G

3. D, F

4. A, B, D, E, F, G, H, J

5. F

6. C, I

Exercise 1.2. Message, format, and audience (page 19)

1. Probably not. Simple novelty or extension of a previous record usually is not enough to warrant publication. A case study must change, improve, or enlarge how people think.

2. The paper your colleague has proposed would have a purpose – to report the case findings – but as a research paper it would not have a message. However, a critical review of case records, coupled with a careful and critical assessment of the literature, might result in a valuable document. A case-series analysis or review article would help busy clinicians get information without laboriously sifting through the primary literature. It would tell investigators where things stand on particular aspects of the disease. And, if well written, it could suggest directions new research should take.

3. Yes, with proper choice of format. Written as a “me-too” series of case histories, the paper will probably be rejected. However, a case-series analysis that would include these data could be a useful contribution.

4. Only one primary research publication is justifiable, because all of the results bear upon your single message. However, this could be supplemented with general articles written for the popular press to reach other target audiences.

5. Psychological researchers, clinicians, psychologists, teachers, school administrators, parents.

Whether or not one is prepared to call them art, visual aids can be vitally important in presenting a scientist's message. They summarize and emphasize key points and reduce narrative length. They simplify information, and in this way enhance understanding. They improve the conciseness and clarity of the narrative. And finally, when carefully crafted, they add visual appeal.

Visual material supports the printed message. Picking up a classic research paper, scientists often scan graphics such as tables and figures to see whether the rest of a paper is worth reading. While they may not go on to study every sentence, they almost always look at every illustration. For this reason, each visual aid must contribute an essential part to the written or spoken story, and each must be capable of standing on its own without reference to the text.

For two major reasons, it pays to start preparing visual aids as early as possible in the writing process. First, because tables and figures present data in condensed form and help clarify and support ideas, they make writing easier. Second, sooner than you think, you'll be asked to give an oral presentation on your research. While the visual aids for a written document seldom are suitable for direct transfer into a slide presentation, they undeniably will form the basis for that presentation.

In this chapter, we'll present guidelines for various types of graphic aids for the traditional research paper.

Proper grammar, formatting, and citations are essential to effective written and oral communication. These fundamentals help avoid misunderstandings and reduce the chances of error in fact or interpretation.

Attention to detail is a little like housekeeping. When it is done well, no one is aware of it. When it is not, everyone can tell. If you skip this step, readers will notice. They may be willing to overlook small inconsistencies, but major blunders will distract their attention away from the primary purpose of the writing. No longer concentrating on the technical content, they start searching for more errors instead.

TWEAK THE TEXT

If effective scientific communication is like a well designed and smoothly operating machine, then grammar – the accepted system of rules by which words are formed and put together to make sentences – forms the nuts and bolts that hold it all together. The individual fasteners of punctuation, capitalization, and such may seem simple and unexciting to look at, but they are undeniably important if the machine is to hold together and function properly.

In this section, we suggest ways of avoiding and correcting some common mechanical mistakes that scientific writers tend to make.

Times change. Today the need to communicate science information effectively is perhaps more important than it has ever been, but the past decade has witnessed a significant revolution in the manner in which we gather, process, and communicate information. The twin technologies of the Internet and personal computers have changed the way nearly everyone works (and plays).

In keeping with the spirit of change, we have extensively revised, updated, and reorganized this third edition. Whether you are a first time author/speaker or a seasoned professional in the biological or medical sciences, we hope you find this step-by-step manual useful.

Because our preface message to you in the second edition still rings true for us, we are including it here as well. Enjoy.

Almost every writer needs to correct and improve his first drafts. Those who can write a finished document and first draft at the same time are few, and might be compared to the rare musical prodigy who can play symphonies without ever taking a music lesson. Revision most often is the step in scientific writing that separates the beginner from the master craftsman. It's the reason why professional writers have such big wastebaskets! They keep working on a piece until it is right.

Two processes are involved in written communication. The first, in your mind, is the selection of words to express your thoughts. The second, in the mind of the reader, is the conversion of the written words into thoughts. The essential difficulty is in trying to ensure that the thoughts created in the mind of the reader are the same thoughts that were in your mind. Revisions are just a way to fine-tune this transfer. Coherence – the quality of being logically and aesthetically consistent – is the desired result.

WORK EFFICIENTLY

Do you remember the Process Approach that was presented in Chapter 1? It counseled breaking the writing task into discrete stages, each to be approached by the most systematic, efficient, and effective means that could be determined.

Writing is usually portrayed as hard, mindless, joyless work. Great authors, it is said, must suffer from a sort of “creative madness” and work in mindless binges under endless pressures of deadlines, exhaustion, and criticism. Writing is said to be stressful, unpleasant, and disliked. Yet, if this were really the sole route to successful writing, why would anyone choose it?

Yes, it is true that stress is associated with writing that is delayed and then forced under deadlines. However, there are more attractive and productive alternatives to writing in tedious, joyless ways. In this chapter we'll guide you along. We'll help you deal promptly with matters of authorship, both to minimize the potential for misunderstandings and to guide collaboration and any division of responsibility. Recommendations for ways to use word processing tools will help you write more proficiently, avoiding pitfalls while becoming adept at using efficiency-enhancing features. We'll show you how to ease the writing task by paying attention to standard format conventions. We'll share tips on ways to build your writing momentum and deal constructively with the dreaded writer's block.

Most of us were drawn to science because, like Vonnegut, we found a subject we feel deeply about, not just because we wanted to write about it. However, all scientists recognize that research must be made known if it is to have lasting value. This is how science moves forward, with the shared word illuminating each step of discovery for the sake of others that follow.

“Scientific writing” can be defined narrowly as the reporting of original research in journals or more broadly to encompass other ways that scientists share research information with one another, such as review articles, posters, and slide-based presentations. (The term “science writing” is often used for writing about science topics for the general public.) Whatever form it takes, successful scientific writing must answer basic questions and address problems raised during the dialogs that identify and define a given subject. It must be clear, concise, and follow established formats. In many ways, its language forms a dialect all its own.

What is the most efficient way to write a paper or presentation that successfully covers all this? This book exists to help you tackle the task, step by step.

The catch phrase “Publish or Perish” – or its more upbeat variant, “Publish and Flourish” – seems to have as much validity as ever in the minds of scientists everywhere. The scientific community has long emphasized quantity and quality of scholarly publications as a way to judge the eminence of scientists. Granting agencies appear to do the same. Scores received by renewal applications for National Institutes of Health funding for research in universities and hospitals have been shown to correlate very strongly with the number of publications resulting from NIH grants. Perhaps it is not surprising that the publication rate of scientific information doubles about every 12 years (Stix, 1994), although few of us will be likely to match the output of a Russian chemist whose scientific productivity over 10 years totaled 948 papers, or about one publication every four days!

All this writing … Does it really make any difference whether it is good, bad, or ugly? We believe it does, and that it matters a great deal, for words are tools of science no less than numbers are. Research is not complete until it is communicated, and publication in a refereed journal is the fundamental unit of scientific communication. The decision not only to write, but to make the effort to write well, lies at the heart of scientific literacy.

Population-level theories of evolution - the stock and trade of population genetics - are statistical theories par excellence. But what accounts for the statistical character of population-level phenomena? One view is that the population-level statistics are a product of, are generated by, probabilities that attach to the individuals in the population. On this conception, population-level phenomena are explained by individual-level probabilities and their population-level combinations. Another view, which arguably goes back to Fisher (1930) but has been defended recently, is that the population-level statistics are sui generis, that they somehow emerge from the underlying deterministic behavior of the individuals composing the population. Walsh, Lewens, and Ariew (2002) label this the statistical interpretation. We are not willing to give them that term, since everyone will admit that the population-level theories of evolution are statistical, so we will call this the emergentist statistical interpretation (ESI). Our goals are to show that (1) this interpretation is based on gross factual errors concerning the practice of evolutionary biology, concerning both what is done and what can be done; (2) its adoption would entail giving up on most of the explanatory and predictive (i.e., scientific) projects of evolutionary biology; and finally (3) a rival interpretation, which we will label the propensity statistical interpretation (PSI), succeeds exactly where the emergentist interpretation fails.

The philosophy of molecular biology was, for a time, entirely preoccupied with reduction and reductionism: primarily the reduction of classical genetics to molecular genetics (Kitcher 1984, Waters 1994, Sarkar 1998), but also and more recently the reduction of complex organismal phenotypes to genes (Rosenberg 1997, Sarkar 1998). While these remain of substantial interest, some new areas of interest have also emerged, including philosophical attention to molecular mechanisms (Machamer, Craver, and Darden 2000, Darden and Tabery 2005) and mathematical models (Keller 2002, Sarkar 2005). In-depth focus on the intricate details of the science is increasingly commonplace (e.g., Schaffner 2000, Burian 2004, Sarkar 2005). Molecular biology has also proved to be of philosophical interest not only for its own sake, but also in the service of molecular explanations of evolution (e.g., Burian 2004), disease (e.g., Kitcher 1996), and behavior (e.g., Schaffner 2000), inter alia.

Accelerating developments in molecular biology since 1953 have strongly encouraged the advocacy of reductionism by a number of important biologists, including Crick, Monod, and E. O. Wilson, and strong opposition by equally prominent biologists, especially Lewontin, along with most philosophers of biology.

Reductionism is a metaphysical thesis, a claim about explanations, and a research program. The metaphysical thesis that reductionists advance (and antireductionists accept) is physicalism, the thesis that all facts, including the biological facts, are fixed by the physical and chemical facts; there are no nonphysical events, states, or processes, and so biological events, states, and processes are “nothing but” physical ones. This metaphysical thesis is one reductionists share with antireductionists. The reductionist argues that the metaphysical thesis has consequences for biological explanations: they need to be completed, corrected, made more precise, or otherwise deepened by more fundamental explanations in molecular biology. The antireductionist denies this inference, arguing that nonmolecular biological explanations are adequate and need no macromolecular correction, completion, or grounding. The research program that reductionists claim follows from the conclusion about explanations can be framed as the methodological moral that biologists should seek such macromolecular explanations.

Most of the issues found in traditional philosophy of science are recapitulated in the philosophy of neurobiology. In particular, philosophers of neurobiology worry about what counts as appropriate empirical justification for a theoretical claim, how to determine which level of organization is the correct one for a scientific explanation, what explanations should look like, whether all explanations will or should reduce to some primitives, and how what we learn about the mind/brain should affect larger social, economic, and political decisions.

In addition, philosophers of neurobiology concern themselves with some traditional aspects of philosophy of mind, including worrying how it is a brain can represent, if it does, and how and whether this representation ties to other notions of representation in cognitive science and beyond. It is difficult to focus on only one of these concerns to the exclusion of the rest. Most likely, as we come to understand some particular aspect of the practice of neurobiology, we will also understand others as well. In what follows, I discuss these areas of concern as they differ from traditional arguments. This discussion therefore should be laid on top of and be seen to complement the very rich literature in traditional philosophy of science and philosophy of mind.