Cover Page

Writing for Earth Scientists

 

52 Lessons in Academic Publishing

Stephen K. Donovan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wiley Logo

For Trevor Jackson (1941–2016), head of department, co‐author and friend, who never, ever failed to be anything but an enthusiast for all and any of my publications.

Foreword

Given the vital importance of clear, accurate and comprehensible communication to the advancement of science, it is remarkable how cavalier, even disdainful, most scientists are to the processes of writing and publishing. There seems to be an implicit assumption that real science is done in the lab or in the field and that writing up is at best an annoyance or worst a hateful imposition to be done as quickly and with as little grace as possible. The merest reflection shows this to be nonsense and dangerous nonsense. Without clearly written, well‐structured and thoughtful papers, monographs and text and reference books, the most important scientific discoveries are worthless. After all, even the double helical structure of DNA would have remained a topic for bar discussion in the Cambridge pub, the Eagle, had Crick and Watson not written their elegant and lucid paper for Nature and thereby changed the world. Until that paper was communicated and circulated, the science contained in it did not exist. Scientists should embrace and celebrate good writing and rejoice when the quality of their written work is recognized. It should be the fundamental basis of what they do but sadly and all too often it is slipshod, obscure, portentous, pretentious and downright incomprehensible. This book will show you how to avoid the pitfalls of bad scientific writing and produce sparkling and readable text that will gain you the reputation of being a discipline leader. What else could you possibly aspire to?

Steve Donovan and I first met when he was a young researcher at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica and I was dreaming of setting up a new scientific and academic imprint, called Belhaven Press, almost 30 years ago. The greatest challenge for a new publisher is to find willing authors. By definition, you have no track record and nothing to show. My own academic background was in the Earth sciences (geography actually. My PhD is on viticulture in France. Well, why not? Someone has to.) so that seemed the obvious place to start. I had just left a drudge job at Macmillan but still had a free subscription to Nature which they had founded over a century before and still publish. Leafing through a copy one hot and tedious afternoon (we had seemingly glamorous but in reality stuffy offices in Covent Garden), I noticed a short but elegantly written article on fossils (ostracods, I think, but it was a long time ago) by a young author who clearly knew how to write well. I wrote to the author to ask if he'd ever thought of writing or editing a book on mass extinctions. He responded weeks later (due to snail mail; this was long before e‐mail) enthusiastically and the result was the beginning of a long and fruitful partnership that has produced several books which we both like to think have changed the field positively, and we have even jointly authored a couple of papers. It also produced a lifelong friendship which we both treasure. The young author was of course Steve Donovan.

Since then, Steve has written dozens of papers and tens of books and monographs for a variety of audiences The publishing world has changed out of all recognition since we first collaborated in 1986. Then it was primarily print on paper and offprints of journal articles were the common currency. (There must be enormous mountains of them, mouldering in university offices and libraries in Africa, China, India and South America.) Now there are digital platforms galore, blogs, preprints, postprints, database data and much else. Yet one thing remains unchanged. If you do not write well and clearly, you will not be read and you may as well not have done the research. Good writing is the most essential thing in science. Nothing else matters so much.

In Writing for Earth Scientists, Steve provides a step‐by‐step guide on how to achieve good clear scientific authorship. If you are browsing this book in a bookshop, your library, on‐screen or on your mobile device courtesy of Mr Amazon, my advice is devour it, memorize and keep it at your side at all times when writing. It will remind you of the what, how and why of your research and you will become a better scientist, more widely read and the envy of your friends and colleagues. It will not make you more beautiful or attractive but you didn’t really expect that, did you? Now, I must get back to my own writing. I have a publisher’s deadline to meet!

Iain Stevenson
Emeritus Professor of Publishing
University College London
Senior Research Fellow,
School of Advanced Study
University of London.

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to all the colleagues, reviewers and editors of the past 35 years, many of which I am proud to call friend, who helped turn each of my papers into something worth publishing. Iain Stevenson, recently retired from University College London, commissioned my first edited book for the late‐lamented Belhaven Press and has also written the Foreword for the present volume – thank you, Iain. Ian Francis, formerly of Wiley‐Blackwell, fed me, tempted me with the idea for this book, but I had to think it through myself before I bit the hook; I am glad that I did. Ramya Raghavan at Wiley‐Blackwell was afflicted by my original typescript, complete with one chapter written twice in different parts of the book (!), and has calmly and enthusiastically guided my scribble through the early stages of the publication process. My children, Hannah and Pelham, have put up with their Dad, always reading, always writing, without complaint; now H. is starting her own course of university study, I hope the writing ‘bug’ bites her, too. My partner, Karen, has provided so much support for this project in so many ways from her lofty eyrie across the North Sea – thank you, Kitten.

Special thanks must be given to places, apart from home, where I wrote this guide in my (now) stained and battered brown notebook. Vascobelo Café in Scheltema bookstore in Amsterdam was a regular haunt for breakfast on Saturdays, providing peace, tranquillity and a soft boiled egg while I wrote a paragraph or two. Subway at Leiden station was my writing place on weekday lunchtimes, where I must have written at least a third of Writing for Geologists. Subway in Hoofddorp fed me and let me scribble mainly at dinnertime, and, if I took the family for a burger at McDonald’s in Hoofddorp, I wrote there, too. If this was a research paper, I would list any sources of grants in the acknowledgements. None of these cafés sponsored me per se, but each was indispensable, providing a table and coffee to encourage my pencil. Thank you, you were all essential to this book.

Thank you to those journals who gave permission for me to reproduce illustrations from some of my earlier publications. These are Figures 23.1 (originally in Bulletin of the Mizunami Fossil Museum, edited by Dr Hiroaki Karasawa), Figures 24.1 and 24.2 (Caribbean Journal of Earth Science, edited by Dr Sherene James‐Williamson), Figure 25.2 (Proceedings of the Isle of Wight Natural History and Archaeological Society, editor Dr. Paul Bingham), Figure 25.3 (Palaios, managing editor Dr Kathleen Huber) and Figure 39.1 (Geological Magazine, Ms Georgia Stratton, Cambridge University Press).

About a quarter of the chapters in this book have been adapted or have evolved from articles published originally on one or other side of the Atlantic Ocean. I thank the publishers for their graciousness in granting permission for their reproduction, each in a more or less changed form, herein. The publishers are, in no particular order, University of Toronto Press, Toronto (publishers of Journal of Scholarly Publishing); Tribune Content Agency on behalf of New Scientist; SEPM (Society for Sedimentary Geology), Tulsa, Oklahoma (Palaios); European Federation of Geologists, Brussels (European Geologist); and the Palaeontological Association, London (Newsletter). Bibliographic details as follows:

  1. Chapter 2, ‘Publication Diversity’, adapted from Journal of Scholarly Publishing (2008, 39: 294–300).
  2. Chapter 7, ‘Short Notes’, adapted from Journal of Scholarly Publishing (2012, 43: 440–3).
  3. Chapter 8, ‘Discussions and Replies to Published Papers’, adapted from Journal of Scholarly Publishing (2016, 47: 213–16).
  4. Chapter 9, ‘Book Reviews’, New Scientist (1993, 140 (1900): 55) and Journal of Scholarly Publishing (2006, 38: 36–40).
  5. Chapter 22, ‘Why Write (1)?’, adapted from Journal of Scholarly Publishing (2011, 42: 262–7).
  6. Chapter 27, ‘Co‐authors and Others’, adapted from New Scientist (1995, 147 (1990): 46–7).
  7. Chapter 30, ‘Editors’, adapted from European Geologist (2004, 17: 16).
  8. Chapter 32, ‘Why Write (2)?’, adapted from Palaeontological Association Newsletter (2006, 61: 62–4).
  9. Chapter 33, ‘Reviews’, adapted from Palaios (2005, 20: 99–100).
  10. Chapter 36, ‘Rejection’, adapted from European Geologist (2003, 16: 41).
  11. Chapter 39, ‘Offprints and Pdfs’, adapted from Journal of Scholarly Publishing (2009, 40: 201–5).
  12. Chapter 41, ‘Reviewing’, adapted from Journal of Scholarly Publishing (2014, 46: 89–95).
  13. Chapter 43, ‘Productivity’, adapted from Journal of Scholarly Publishing (2011, 42: 382–6).
  14. Chapter 46, ‘Plain English’, adapted from Journal of Scholarly Publishing (2012, 44: 105–6).
  15. Chapter 48, ‘Why Write (4)?’, adapted from Journal of Scholarly Publishing (2005, 36: 238–42).

Stephen K. Donovan
Thursday, 8 December 2016