Publishing a science book – Lesson #1: The publisher is always right about everything

Don't bother trying to reason with a publisher. All of them have different views on proper style and every single one of them is absolutely certain that their style is the only correct one.

I'm in the middle of the copyedit stage of my book. This is the stage where a copyeditor goes through your manuscript and makes any corrections to spelling and grammar. This is a lot of work for any copyeditor having to deal with one of my manuscripts and I greatly appreciate the effort. My book is a lot better now than it was a few weeks ago. (Who knew that there was only one l in canceled?

It's also the stage where the publisher imposes their particular style on the manusript and that can be a problem. I'll document some of the issues in subsequent posts but to give you an example, consider the titles of books in the reference list. I wrote it like this: The Selfish Gene and Molecular and Genome Evolution. This is not in line with my publisher's handbook of style so the titles were converted to lowercase as in: The selfish gene and Molecular and genome evolution. I objected, pointing to numerous other science books that used the same titles that are on the covers of the books and suggesting that my readers were more familiar with The Selfish Gene than with The selfish gene.

I was overruled by my publisher who noted that they make their style choices for good reasons—it's for "consistency, clarity, and ease of reading." I assume that publishers, such as Oxford, would make the same argument while insisting that the title should be The Selfish Gene.

In case you ever find yourself in this position, you should keep in mind that your contract will almost certainly say that the publisher has complete control of your book and they can make any changes they want as long as it doesn't affect the meaning of what you wrote.

Here's what it says in my contract, "The Publisher shall publish the Author's work in whatever style and format it thinks most suitable ... While the Publisher may, in its sole discretion, consult the Author with respect to said style and format, the Publisher retains the right to make all final decisions on matters of format, design, selling price and marketing."

I was aware of some issues with inappropriate covers and tiles in the past so I had an extra sentence added to the contract that said, "The Publisher and Author will discuss and agree upon the title and cover design." It's a good thing I put that in because the publisher was pressuring me to change the title of the book and I was able to resist.

Authors can't win most fights over style and format. I've been discussing the publishing of science books with a number of other authors over the past few months and several of them told me not to bother trying to argue with a publisher because they will never give in. They have a set style for all books and they won't make an exception for an individual author no matter how good an argument you make.

I didn't listen to those other authors. Silly me.

I'm thinking of trying to write a standard set of guidelines that scientists could put into their contracts to cover the most egregious style restrictions. It might be helpful if all science writers would insist on inserting these guidelines into their contracts.


University press releases are a major source of science misinformation

Here's an example of a press release that distorts science by promoting incorrect information that is not found in the actual publication.

The problems with press releases are well-known but nobody is doing anything about it. I really like the discussion in Stuart Ritchie's recent (2020) book where he begins with the famous "arsenic affair" in 2010. Sandwalk readers will recall that this started with a press conference by NASA announcing that arsenic replaces phosphorus in the DNA of some bacteria. The announcement was treated with contempt by the blogosphere and eventually the claim was discproved by Rosie Redfield who showed that the experiment was flawed [The Arsenic Affair: No Arsenic in DNA!].

This was a case where the science was wrong and NASA should have known before it called a press conference. Ritchie goes on to document many cases where press releases have distorted the science in the actual publication. He doesn't mention the most egregious example, the ENCODE publicity campaign that successfully convinced most scientists that junk DNA was dead [The 10th anniversary of the ENCODE publicity campaign fiasco].

I like what he says about "churnalism" ...

In an age of 'churnalism', where time-pressed journalists often simply repeat the content of press releases in their articles (science news reports are often worded vitrually identically to a press release), scientists have a great deal of power—and a great deal of responsibility. The constraints of peer review, lax as they might be, aren't present at all when engaging with the media, and scientists' biases about the importance of their results can emerge unchecked. Frustratingly, once the hype bubble has been inflated by a press release, it's difficult to burst.

Press releases of all sorts are failing us but university press releases are the most disappointing because we expect universities to be credible sources of information. It's obvious that scientists have to accept the blame for deliberately distorting their findings but surely the information offices at universities are also at fault? I once suggested that every press release has to include a statement, signed by the scientists, saying that the press release accurately reports the results and conclusions that are in the published article and does not contain any additional information or speculation that has not passed peer review.

Let's look at a recent example where the scientists would not have been able to truthfully sign such a statement.

A group of scientists based largely at The University of Sheffield in Sheffield (UK) recently published a paper in Nature on DNA damage in the human genome. They noted that such damage occurs preferentially at promoters and enhancers and is associated with demethylation and transcription activation. They presented evidence that the genome can be partially protected by a protein called "NuMA." I'll show you the abstract below but for now that's all you need to know.

The University of Sheffield decided to promote itself by issuing a press release: Breaks in ‘junk’ DNA give scientists new insight into neurological disorders. This title is a bit of a surprise since the paper only talks about breaks in enhancers and promoters and the word "junk" doesn't appear anywhere in the published report in Nature.

The first paragraph of the press release isn' very helpful.

‘Junk’ DNA could unlock new treatments for neurological disorders as scientists discover how its breaks and repairs affect our protection against neurological disease.

What could this mean? Surely they don't mean to imply that enhancers and promoters are "junk DNA"? That would be really, really, stupid. The rest of the press release should explain what they mean.

The groundbreaking research from the University of Sheffield’s Neuroscience Institute and Healthy Lifespan Institute gives important new insights into so-called junk DNA—or DNA previously thought to be non-essential to the coding of our genome—and how it impacts on neurological disorders such as Motor Neurone Disease (MND) and Alzheimer’s.

Until now, the body’s repair of junk DNA, which can make up 98 per cent of DNA, has been largely overlooked by scientists, but the new study published in Nature found it is much more vulnerable to breaks from oxidative genomic damage than previously thought. This has vital implications on the development of neurological disorders.

Oops! Apparently, they really are that stupid. The scientists who did this work seem to think that 98% of our genome is junk and that includes all the regulatory sequences. It seems like they are completely unaware of decades of work on discovering the function of these regulatory sequences. According The University of Sheffield, these regulatory sequences have been "largely overlooked by scientists." That will come as a big surprise to many of my colleagues who worked on gene regulation in the 1980s and in all the decades since then. It will probably also be a surprise to biochemistry and molecular biology undergraduates at Sheffield—at least I hope it will be a surprise.

Professor Sherif El-Khamisy, Chair in Molecular Medicine at the University of Sheffield, Co-founder and Deputy Director of the Healthy Lifespan Institute, said: “Until now the repair of what people thought is junk DNA has been mostly overlooked, but our study has shown it may have vital implications on the onset and progression of neurological disease."

I wonder if Professor Sherif El-Khamisy can name a single credible scientist who thinks that regulatory sequences are junk DNA?

There's no excuse for propagating this kind of misinformation about junk DNA. It's completely unnecessary and serves only to discredit the university and its scientists.

Ray, S., Abugable, A.A., Parker, J., Liversidge, K., Palminha, N.M., Liao, C., Acosta-Martin, A.E., Souza, C.D.S., Jurga, M., Sudbery, I. and El-Khamisy, S.F. (2022) A mechanism for oxidative damage repair at gene regulatory elements. Nature, 609:1038-1047. doi:[doi: 10.1038/s41586-022-05217-8]

Oxidative genome damage is an unavoidable consequence of cellular metabolism. It arises at gene regulatory elements by epigenetic demethylation during transcriptional activation1,2. Here we show that promoters are protected from oxidative damage via a process mediated by the nuclear mitotic apparatus protein NuMA (also known as NUMA1). NuMA exhibits genomic occupancy approximately 100 bp around transcription start sites. It binds the initiating form of RNA polymerase II, pause-release factors and single-strand break repair (SSBR) components such as TDP1. The binding is increased on chromatin following oxidative damage, and TDP1 enrichment at damaged chromatin is facilitated by NuMA. Depletion of NuMA increases oxidative damage at promoters. NuMA promotes transcription by limiting the polyADP-ribosylation of RNA polymerase II, increasing its availability and release from pausing at promoters. Metabolic labelling of nascent RNA identifies genes that depend on NuMA for transcription including immediate–early response genes. Complementation of NuMA-deficient cells with a mutant that mediates binding to SSBR, or a mitotic separation-of-function mutant, restores SSBR defects. These findings underscore the importance of oxidative DNA damage repair at gene regulatory elements and describe a process that fulfils this function.


The 10th anniversary of the ENCODE publicity campaign fiasco

On Sept. 5, 2012 ENCODE researchers, in collaboration with the science journal Nature, launched a massive publicity campaign to convince the world that junk DNA was dead. We are still dealing with the fallout from that disaster.

The Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) was originally set up to discover all of the functional elements in the human genome. They carried out a massive number of experiments involving a huge group of researchers from many different countries. The results of this work were published in a series of papers in the September 6th, 2012 issue of Nature. (The papers appeared on Sept. 5th.)

Read more »

Science communication in the modern world

Science editors asked young scientists to imagine what kind of course they would have created if they could go back to a time before the pandemic [A pandemic education]. Three of the courses were about science communication.

COM 145: Identification, analysis, and communication of scientific evidence

This course focuses on developing the skills required to translate scientific evidence into accessible information for the general public, especially under circumstances that lead to the intensification of fear and misinformation. Discussions will cover the principles of the scientific method, as well as its theoretical and practical relevance in counteracting the dissemination of pseudoscience, particularly on social media. This course discusses chapters from Carl Sagan’s book The Demon-Haunted World, certain peer-reviewed and retracted papers, and materials related to key science issues, such as the anti-vaccine movement. For the final project, students will comprehensibly communicate a scientific topic to the public.

Camila Fonseca Amorim da Silva University of Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil

COM 198: Everyday science communication

As scientific discoveries become increasingly specialized, the lack of understanding by the general public undermines trust in scientists and causes the spread of misinformation. This course will be taught by scientists and communication specialists who will provide students with a toolset to explain scientific concepts, as well as their own research projects, to the general public. Upon completion of this course, students will be able to explain to their grandparents that viruses exist even though they can’t see them, convince their neighbors that vaccines don’t contain tracking devices, and explain the concept of exponential growth to governmental officials.

Anna Uzonyi Department of Molecular Genetics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel.

COM 232: Introduction to talking to regular people

Communicating science is difficult. Many scientists, having immersed themselves in the language of their field, have completely forgotten how to talk to regular people. This course hones introductory science communication skills, such as how to talk about scary things without generating mass panic, how to calmly discourage the hoarding of paper hygiene products, and how to explain why scientific knowledge changes over time. The final project will include cross examination from law school faculty, who are otherwise completely uninvolved with the course and possess minimal scientific training. Recommended for science majors who are unable to discuss impactful scientific findings without citing a P value.

Joseph Michael Cusimano Bernard J. Dunn School of Pharmacy, Shenandoah University, Winchester, VA, USA.

They sound like interesting courses but my own take on science communication is somewhat different. I think it's very difficult for practicing scientists to communicate effectively with the general public so I tend to view science communication at several different levels. My goal is to communicate with an audience of scientists, science journalists, and people who are already familiar with science. The idea is to make sure that this intermediate group understands the scientific facts in my field and to make sure they are familiar with the major controversies.

My hope is that this intermediate group will disseminate this information to their less-informed friends and relatives and, more importantly, stop the spread of misinformation whenever they hear it.

Take junk DNA for example. It's very difficult to convince the average person that 90% of our genome is junk because the idea is so counter-intuitive and contrary to the popular counter-narratives. However, I have a chance of convincing the intermediate group, including science journalists and other scientists, who can follow the scientific arguments. If I succeed, they will at least stop spreading misinformation and false narratives and start presenting alternatives to their sudiences.


Science writing in the age of denial

Here's an interesting presentation by Sean B. Carroll, the evolutionary biologist and author of several books on evolution. He's also written a fascinating book on Jacques Monod and he gave a talk at the University of Toronto a few years ago on the role of chance in evolution—I have a signed copy of his book (see the photo and my blog post: Biologist Sean Carroll in Toronto).

Sean likes to emphasize the importance of storytelling in science communication and education. By this he sometimes means stories about individual scientists and sometimes stories about the history of a subject. As Vice President for Science Education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Washington DC (USA) he has helped craft some short videos for high school students and the presentation contains an example of one on evolution. I'm not sure I fully agree with his emphasis on storytelling—as least not to the extent that he promotes it—but some version of it can be useful as long as it doesn't get in the way of understanding important concepts.

I leave it to you to decide whether the short HHMI video is the best way to teach high school students about evolution. I personally don't like the undue emphasis on natural selection and natural history.

The reason for drawing your attention to an old 2012 presentation is to remind you about the charactieristics of science denial. Sean explains the six rules of denialism.

  1. Doubt the Science
  2. Question Scientist's Motives and Integrity
  3. Magnify Disagreements among Scientists and Cite Gadflies as Authorities
  4. Exaggerate Potential Harm
  5. Appeal to Personal Freedom
  6. Acceptance Would Repudiate Key Philosophy

His examples are the denial of evolution by creationists and the rejection of vaccinations by chiropractors. Today, we see how the same rules apply to those who reject COVID-19 vaccinations and to the Lab Leak Conspiracy Theory.


Style vs substance in science communication: The role of science writers in major science journals

Science writers have always had articles published in the leading science journals such as Science and Nature but over the past few decades their role seems to have increased so that now even lesser journals employ them to write articles, commentary, and press releases. I recently posted an example of where this can go horribly wrong [Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE) spreads misinformation about junk DNA].

The role of science writers has come to dominate the pages of Science and Nature so that we now have a situation where only two thirds of the pages in a typical issue are devoted to actual science publications and most readers are concentrating on the news and opinons in the front part of the journal. In some cases, the science writers control the image of these journals as happened at Nature during the ENCODE publicity campaign in 2012. Over at Science, Elisabeth Pennisi has done more to spread misinformation than any scientist in the field of molecular biology.

These are cases where science writers have sacrificed sustance for style. They write nice readable articles that promote the image of their journal but are scientifcally incorrect.

Let's look at a specific example. Back in 2005 Science celebrated its 125th anniversary by publishing "125 Questions: What We Don't Know." One of those questions was "Why Do Humans Have So Few Genes?"—a question that scientists had adequately answered in 2005 but you wouldn't know that from the short article written by Elizabeth Pennisi [SCIENCE Questions: Why Do Humans Have So Few Genes?]. The article was full of untruths and misinformation. There were lots of other questions in that issue that were just as ridiculous if you knew the topics.

Now, you might imagine that these questions were posed by the leading researchers in their fields but you would be wrong. The list of questions was drawn up by editors and science writers as described in the anniversary issue [SCIENCE Questions: Asking the Right Question].

We began by asking Science’s Senior Editorial Board, our Board of Reviewing Editors, and our own editors and writers to suggest questions that point to critical knowledge gaps. The ground rules: Scientists should have a good shot at answering the questions over the next 25 years, or they should at least know how to go about answering them. We intended simply to choose 25 of these suggestions and turn them into a survey of the big questions facing science. But when a group of editors and writers sat down to select those big questions, we quickly realized that 25 simply wouldn’t convey the grand sweep of cutting-edge research that lies behind the responses we received. So we have ended up with 125 questions, a fitting number for Science’s 125th anniversary.

Isn't it remrkable that editors and writers are being asked to evaluate science (substance) as if their opinions were more important than those of the scientists?

Has Science learned from these mistakes? No, because a few months ago they published a new list of 125 questions in collaboration with the 125th anniversary of Shanghai Jiao Tong University: 125 Questions: Exploration and Discovery. The list of questions hasn't gotten any better; it includes questions like, "How do organisms evolve?"; "What genes make us uniquely human?"; and "How are biomolecules organized in cells to function orderly and effectively?" Many of you can imagine what the short accompanying explanation looks like and you would be right.

Pennisi's original question has disappeared but there's a very similar question in the 2021 list.

Why are some genomes so big and others very small?

Genome size, which is the amount of DNA in a cell nucleus, is extremely diverse across animals and plants, and varies more than 64,000-fold. The smallest genome recorded exists in the microsporidian Encephalitozoon intestinalis (a parasite in certain mammals), and the largest genome belongs to a flowering plant known as Paris japonica, which has 150 billion base pairs of DNA per cell (50 times larger than that of a human). Plants are interesting in that their genome size plays an important role in their biology and evolution. But as the authors of a 2017 paper in Trends in Plant Sciences wrote: “Although we now know the major contributors to genome size diversity are non-protein coding, often highly repetitive DNA sequences, why their amounts vary so much still remains enigmatic.”

Sandwalk readers know that knowledgeable scientists came up with good answers to that question about 50 years ago. One answer is that different species have different amounts of junk DNA because some species don't have large enough populations to eliminate it by natural selection. In other cases, the differences are due to polyploidization.

You would think that after all the criticism of Science over their past coverage of genomes and junk DNA that the writers and editors would know this. But they don't, and that's because science writers and editors seem to be remarkably immune to scientific criticism. (The topic probably doesn't come up when they get together at their science writers' conventions.) I'm making the case that they are so focused on style (science writing) that they just don't care about substance (scientific accuracy).

The major journals have a serious problem that they don't recognize. A lot of the stuff that appears in their journals is not scientifically accurate or, at the very least, is misleading. They're not going to fix this problem if their editorial staff is dominated by science journalists.


Style vs substance in science communication: The science writer perspective

I want to address a recent article on science writing: When editors and scientists meet: communicating science without dumbing it down. The author is Alex Ip and the article is a commentary on a panel session about science writing at the ScienceWriters2021 conference held in early October [Editing experts: How to help scientists meet journalism standards].

This workshop is for science writers and journalists interested in editing expert authors. More journalism outlets are inviting scientists to write commentaries, and paying editors to commission and hone drafts. Yet the effort to bring expert analysis to a broader audience can create a clash between scientific and journalistic expertise: researchers often have little experience writing clearly and accurately for the public. In many cases, experts are not used to being edited and are profoundly uncomfortable drawing on personal, relatable experiences or writing in simple, declarative sentences. Too often submissions have unchecked assertions, uncertain relevance, and inaccessible prose.

This panel will show how to apply journalistic craft for narrative, relevance, accuracy, and clarity to make sure readers benefit from expertise in content and communication. Participants will learn from editors who work for independent publications or institutional press offices on expert-authored pieces. Panelists will turn their experiences into case studies, helpful tips, and practical solutions to help non-writers create compelling articles.

I want to preface my comments by making a generalization about science writing and science communication. It is awful. In those fields where I have direct knowledge, the general quality of science writing is far below any standard that scientists would find acceptable. My colleagues in other fields echo these concerns. The worst examples are university press releases where it would be challenging to find one that would get a passing grade in an undergraduate science course.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There are some high quality exceptions to this generalization but they stand out because they are so exceptional.

Humor me by allowing me to make another generalization. Discussions about good science communication often involve science writers taking among themselves. There’s a strong sense of irony in this because, as I just mentioned, the field of science writing is in really bad shape so it’s not likely that these writers have the solutions to fix the problem on their own. It’s doubly ironic because in these discussions among themselves, science writers tend to blame the scientists and not each other.

As we'll see below, scientists share a lot of the blame because they frequently promote bad science but there's more than enough blame to go around and science writers/editors are not blameless.

Having got that off my chest, let’s look more closely at what Alex Ip wrote on the National Association of Science Writers (NASW) website.

Most scientists are used to publishing research papers for their peers, a process that could take years, allowing them to pore over every word in every sentence. No such luxury exists in writing popular science pieces that have a turnaround time of a few weeks or going to a carnival to speak to eager middle-schoolers. Here’s where science editors and communications specialists step in. Using their journalism expertise, they help scientists prioritize the audience without “dumbing down the science”.

The emphasis here is on fast turnaround times but let’s not forget that there are other kinds of science writing, such as books, that don’t have short deadlines. The turnaround time is a bit of a red herring because it’s not obvious to me that science writers do any better when they have lots of time to think about what they're writing and editing.

The main issue here is whether “journalism expertise” is successful in communicating science without dumbing it down or getting it wrong. The emphasis here is on helping scientists with the writing but this leaves out a very important part of the problem; namely, whether what the scientist wants to say is accurate or not. In my opinion, good science writers should be knowledgeable about the field and skeptical about the motives of the scientist they are interviewing or editing. Their role should not just be to make the scientist’s words sound better but also to put them into context and evaluate their accuracy.

Let’s set that aside for now and deal with the issue of style and editing. Who is right if scientists and science writers disagree about the editing process? Is it just about the “audience”? Do science writers always know who their audience is?

[Tamara] Poles, the community engagement specialist at the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center in Chapel Hill, N.C., is adamant about scientists understanding what makes their specific audience tick—and what makes themselves tick too. She would usually sit down with them to understand their hobbies and passions. If there are things that experts and the audience can both relate to and get emotionally invested in, it is much easier to develop analogies that explain the science and build trust. "Never talk at the audience, and never assume that they understand your jargon."

This is an interesting example because I happen to know someone (cough! my daughter) who has given science talks at the Moorhead.1 These are usually presentations to a general audience of people, or children, who are interested in science. Those presentations require a high degree of presentation skills and a huge emphasis on style. The substance is important but it’s not a place where you are going to explain complicated subjects like why our genome is full of junk DNA or why the Lab Leak Conspiracy Theory is crazy.

This is a situation where both the scientist and the science writer have a pretty good idea who the audience is. I suspect that someone with years of experience, such as Tamara Poles, could be really helpful in such a situation.

One of the other panelists, Hannah Hoag, asks scientists to give a one sentence summary about why the story matters and then it’s up to the editors to craft a narrative that “serves the current audience.” She didn’t give any examples but I can imagine a scientist telling their press officer that their latest publication overthrows the dogma of junk DNA and then the science writer will turn this into a good story for the press release.

What happens in many cases is that the press release emphasizes the opinions of the scientists and not what's actually in the paper under discussion. There's often a very good reason why the bizarre opinions of the scientist didn't make it past peer review. It's not a good idea for university press officers to overrule the peer review process in order to make the scientist seem more human. That could, and often does, backfire.

The result is often a press release that is scientifically inaccurate and misrepresents what actually got published. Is this a case where the science writer is too eager to craft a narrative at the expense of scientific accuracy?

The fact that the knowledgeable members of the audience will mock the press release apparently isn’t relevant because the wider audience, who doesn’t know any better, will come away with the impression that your university is at leading edge of knowledge in this field.

What’s the proper audience in this case? I maintain that it’s the scientifically literate readers who know something about the topic. If they aren’t onside then the rest of the audience doesn’t matter. This is why I say that the top three criteria in science communication are accuracy, accuracy, and accuracy. I get the impression that for press officers the top three criteria are publicity, publicity, and publicity.

Press officers should know to not always believe their scientist, especially if the sceintist is obviously hyping their results. Do your homework. Stick to what's actually in the scientific paper that was published.

The decline of Scientific American

Now we get to one of the most interesting comments in the article—it concerns the magazine Scientific American. I started my subscription to Scientific American when I was about twelve years old and I kept it until I graduated from college. I had no trouble understanding the articles even though they contained a fair amount of scientific jargon and concepts and ideas that were new to me. I vividly remember learning about the genetic code from Marshall Nirenberg [THE GENETIC CODE II] and Francis Crick [THE GENETIC CODE III] and learning about gene regulation from Mark Ptashne and Walter Gilbert [Genetic Repressors].

I also remember articles by Seymour Benzer [The Fine Structure of the Gene and an excellent and exciting article on VIRUSES AND GENES by François Jacob and Elie L. Wollman. That last article was the beginning of my desire to work on bacteria and bacteriophage when I grew up. I had no idea that I would eventually get to meet all those famous scientists.

Later on, I read Mootoo Kimura’s article on The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution and that helped solidify my understanding of Neutral Theory.

I’m adding a couple of figures from some of those articles to show you the level that was considered appropriate for high school and college students who were interested in science.

I can assure you from personal experience that some editors might consider figures like that to be too advanced for a book on what’s in your genome and the new editors of Scientific American would probably agree since that magazine has been dumbed down to the point where us old fogies don’t even recognize it.

Here’s what one of the panelists had to say about that.

Michael Lemonick, the recently retired Chief Opinion Editor of Scientific American, pointed out that Scientific American has transitioned over time from a highly technical publication to one with a significant online presence that has focused on popular science, controversies, and the sociology of science. That means resetting the expectations of scientists that may have grown up reading the magazine in print. One way he does it is to provide a marked-up copy of the draft back to scientists and explain the edits to them, not being afraid to challenge the experts in the field. “We are experts at what we do [too]. This is not a problem for us.”

What’s changed is the perceived audience. Back in the 1960s, the audience was expected to be interested in science and willing to learn new things and new jargon. They were expected to be intelligent. From the point of view of science writers, today’s target audience is very different. Science writers now think that today’s audience can’t handle the “highly technical” level that I easily coped with when I was in high school.

You can get a good impression of how low Scientific American has sunk by comparing a 1972 cover with one from this year.

I think the science writers are wrong. I think that the people who should be reading their articles and buying their books are the same ones who used to read Scientific American and bought The Molecular Biology of the Gene back in the 1960s. They also bought and read Chance and Necessity in 1972. They are people who are interested in science and are scientifically literate. They are willing to learn new things so they're not afraid of articles containing new information that they've never heard before. This audience is NOT the people who read the latest novels on the New York Times best sellers list.2

Science writers have abandoned that audience and scientific literacy has suffered. When is the last time you read Scientific American?

The intended audience

Let's be clear about the possible roles of science editors. Editors can be really helpful in recommending stylistic changes that make an article or book read better. That’s a given. But problems arise when an editor wants to change the content (substance) in order to address a perceived audience. That’s when the scientist can balk.

Here’s another panelist who talks about the intended audience.

Like Lemonick, Fenella Saunders, the Editor-in-Chief of American Scientist (not related to Scientific American), would politely and determinedly explain to scientists she works with how stylistic edits would make it clearer for the audience. In addition, she would ask experts to carefully read through captions and scale bars to make sure that they are accurate and presentable. To grease the wheels, she would further complete an author agreement that lays out the timeline and expectations. Publication is not guaranteed upon acceptance of a draft at American Scientist unless scientists put in the work to reframe their work that resonates with their intended audience.

In my experience, it’s the definition of “intended audience” that’s at issue. Many editors are convinced that they know more about the intended audience than the scientists and I don’t think that’s true. As I pointed out above, the expectation of the intended audience has declined considerably over the past 50 years so there's been increasing pressure on scientists to dumb down their writing to meet these lowered expectations. Maybe the scientists want to write for a different audience? What if "dumbing down" has gone too far? Why don’t we try to elevate the level of science communication and raise our expectations? Maybe it will lead to increased science literacy.3

I think American Scientist (published by Sigma Xi) is another example of a popular magazine whose level of scientific accuracy and sophistication has dropped over the past few decades.

When I was a student in college, our biology department subscribed to American Scientist and I read every issue when it came out. The articles were at the level expected for students in university. Now all the articles have to be hyped to try and attract extra readers.

Let’s look at an example. The figure below is taken from an article published in 1969 by a famous scientist, Robert Sinsheimer [THE PROSPECT FOR DESIGNED GENETIC CHANGE]. You can read the article yourself but all you have to do is look at the figure below to see that this is a level that no modern science editors would accept. They think that today’s audience is much too stupid to understand anything this complicated no matter how well it’s explained by the scientist author.

Fast forward to 2021 and this is the kind of article that’s published in American Scientist: Turning Junk into Us: How Genes Are Born. In this case it’s a collaboration between a science writer, Emily Mortola, and a scientist, Manyuan Long. Here’s a quotation from the article.

Close to 99 percent of our genome has been historically classified as noncoding, useless “junk” DNA. Consequently, these sequences were rarely studied.

Now, that may make for easy reading and clarity but it’s just BS. Everything in those two sentences is wrong. Substance was sacrificed for style. If you want more information you can read my blog post from last May [More misinformation about junk DNA: this time it's in American Scientist].

I don’t know what kind of audience American Scientist is targeting but it certainly isn’t any of the undergraduates who took my courses. They would recognize right away that the article totally misrepresents the field. The authors even get the Central Dogma wrong. (They’re in good company, many scientists also get it wrong.) I'm pretty sure that an article as bad as that would never have gotten published in the 1960s because those articles were written by experts in their field. (It would be interesting to know whether the editors of those magazines made significant changes to the drafts submitted by Francis Crick, Seymour Benzer, or Robert Sinsheimer. You probably know the answer if you know these men!)

Science editors want to help

I'm certain that the editors on the panel are genuinely interested in helping scientists communicate with the general public but they really need to examine their own house before preaching to scientists. Tamara Poles is quoted as saying that she often sends outstanding examples of science writing to scientists in order help them learn the best engagement practices. I’d be interested in seeing some of these "outstanding" examples in biochemistry, molecular biology, or evolution.

The article closes with advocating the lofty goal of editors and scientists working together to find common ground with their audience.

There is no reason why the wonders and obstacles of science can’t be understood by more people if the effort is put in.

That’s a good idea in principle but it's not working in practice. These editors first have to come to grips with the fact that they have not been very successful so far. For example, I’m writing a book that includes a chapter on the ENCODE publicity campaign of 2012—a campaign that illustrates just how easy it was to dupe science writers into spreading false information. There are plenty of other examples.

Here’s some advice from a scientist to science writers and editors.

  • You need to be knowledgeable about your subject. There are plenty of scientists out there who are interested in spreading false information and it’s your job to be skeptical and confirm that you’ve got the facts straight. Substance first, style later. Fact checking is the new reality.

  • Make sure you understand the real audience—not the one you have been trained to imagine. I suggest that the real audience is a lot more intelligent than you give them credit for. They can handle scientific terms and some jargon. Let’s incease the level of science writing to address a more sophisticated audience instead of dumbing it down to the level of an audience that’s never going to read your articles.

  • If the main purpose of writing press releases if to get publicity by spreading your copy to media outlets then you are not a science writer. You are a publicist.

  • Some science is complicated. I’m thinking of evolution, genomes, and biochemistry, but I’m sure this applies to geology, physics, and chemistry as well. It certainly applies to climate change. There will be times when your editorial preferences conflict with the wishes of the scientist who wants to explain some difficult concepts. Be prepared to sacrifice a bit of style in order to get the substance right.

  • The wonders and obstacles of science—with all it’s complexities and limitations—can be understood by more people but only if you understand it yourself and are willing to collaborate on the science as well as the writing.


1. I even attended one of her talks and I can say, without a hint of bias, that they were brilliant!

2. I concede that in an ideal world you could sell a million copies of a science book by appealing to the wider audience but those kind of books are often ones that sacrifice substance for style and some of us can’t lower ourselves to write those kind of books.

3. I'm sure the question of sales and profit will come up in the comments. We can discuss it there.

Off to the publisher!

The first draft of my book is ready to be sent to my publisher.

Text by Laurence A. Moran

Cover art and figures by Gordon L. Moran

  • 11 chapters
  • 112,000 words (+ preface and glossary)
  • about 370 pages (estimated)
  • 26 figures
  • 305 notes
  • 400 references

©Laurence A. Moran


Scientists say “sloppy science” more serious than fraud

An article on Nature: INDEX reports on a recent survey of scientists: Cutting corners a bigger problem than research fraud. The subtitle says it all: Scientists are more concerned about the impact of sloppy science than outright scientific fraud.

The survey was published on BioMed Central.
Bouter, L.M., Tijdink, J., Axelsen, N., Martinson, B.C., and ter Riet, G. (2016) Ranking major and minor research misbehaviors: results from a survey among participants of four World Conferences on Research Integrity. Research Integrity and Peer Review, 1(1), 17. [doi: 10.1186/s41073-016-0024-5]

Abstract
Background


Codes of conduct mainly focus on research misconduct that takes the form of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism. However, at the aggregate level, lesser forms of research misbehavior may be more important due to their much higher prevalence. Little is known about what the most frequent research misbehaviors are and what their impact is if they occur.

Methods

A survey was conducted among 1353 attendees of international research integrity conferences. They were asked to score 60 research misbehaviors according to their views on and perceptions of the frequency of occurrence, preventability, impact on truth (validity), and impact on trust between scientists on 5-point scales. We expressed the aggregate level impact as the product of frequency scores and truth, trust and preventability scores, respectively. We ranked misbehaviors based on mean scores. Additionally, relevant demographic and professional background information was collected from participants.

Results

Response was 17% of those who were sent the invitational email and 33% of those who opened it. The rankings suggest that selective reporting, selective citing, and flaws in quality assurance and mentoring are viewed as the major problems of modern research. The “deadly sins” of fabrication and falsification ranked highest on the impact on truth but low to moderate on aggregate level impact on truth, due to their low estimated frequency. Plagiarism is thought to be common but to have little impact on truth although it ranked high on aggregate level impact on trust.

Conclusions

We designed a comprehensive list of 60 major and minor research misbehaviors. Our respondents were much more concerned over sloppy science than about scientific fraud (FFP). In the fostering of responsible conduct of research, we recommend to develop interventions that actively discourage the high ranking misbehaviors from our study.
This is important because science journals and leading scientific societies tend to focus on fraud and retractions as the leading causes of mistrust in science. This survey suggests—correctly in my opinion—that the real problems are far more serious.

Here are the top five problems according to the survey results.
  • Selectively cite to enhance your own findings or convictions
  • Insufficiently supervise or mentor junior coworkers
  • Not publish a valid “negative” study
  • Demand or accept an authorship for which one does not qualify
  • Selectively cite to please editors, reviewers, or colleagues
If these are the real problems then that puts the leading journals in an awkward position. So far, they have put the blame on scientists and pretended that they are not part of the problem. But if those five problems are the real reasons why scientists and the general public are losing faith in science then the journals themselves are partly to blame (e.g. ENCODE, Arsenic-Life). Science journals need to improve peer review and they need to punish authors and reviewers who allow publication of sloppy science.


Oldest Homo sapiens a “nothingburger”? Plus US health care policy approaches The End

0000-0002-8715-2896 Oldest Homo sapiens a “nothingburger”? Plus top journos blast secrecy on health care law   Posted June 16, 2017 by Tabitha M. Powledge in Uncategorized post-info AddThis Sharing Buttons above OLDEST HOMO SAPIENS? It’s