There continues to be much confusion about the merits of Open Access journals. For readers, there is no doubt they are welcome. Print journals in many libraries are costly and in some cases the costs are passed on to the reader. So I was interested to find an article in The Scientist about a new […]
Category: Writing for Publication
Diagnose your writing
Most authors struggle to improve their writing. I certainly do. So I was pleased when a colleague sent me the link below. It is a ‘quick and dirty’ way to diagnose your writing. You may not agree but it is fun and easy, so worth a try. For the record, I submitted some of the […]
Another bit of writing wisdom
Avoid the misuse of literally! It is often (not) literally correct!.. The Montreal Gazette runs a column by Mark Abley on writing. This is one of my favourites, reprinted with his kind permission. ..”When the global oil companies run your country,” the B.C. columnist Murray Dobbin wrote a few weeks ago, “when they own your […]
Best twitter feeds for injury prevention?
Those of you who have found and read our blog likely also know that Injury Prevention has a twitter feed. We use twitter to call attention to papers in the journal, to news from the BMJ Group of general interest to authors in biomedical fields and to interesting observations, events and data from the broader […]
More on writing
My niece sent me this: “The past, the present, and the future walked into a bar. It was tense.” Meant just to be a joke but I detect an important message for writers in there: be sure to keep tenses consistent. On another note: Our local paper publishes a column on words, aptly called “Watchwords”. […]
Avoid clichés like the plague
Setting aside the jokey one above, it is nonetheless wise for writers to avoid clichés as much as possible. Most editors and many reviewers are allergic to them; the reaction is to look more carefully at the writing and perhaps to be less forgiving. Some clichés are more offensive than others, so we are told by the […]
Researchers pressured to cite superfluous papers
The results of a survey published in Science was the topic of a thoughtful piece in Nature. The issue was how often authors are pressured to use references that help the Journal (by boosting its impact factor) but which are otherwise superfluous. Apparently 20% of academics in the social sciences and business have had this […]
Too much coverage? Only when it is inaccurate!
Oscar Wilde is reputed to have said, “”The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” Others have paraphrased this as there is no such thing as bad publicity. This came to mind when I began scanning the web and the press in preparation for this column and discovered the astonishing […]
Use of words: Impact
I don’t enjoy seeing the word ‘impact’ used as a verb when the writer is talking about the effect one thing has on another. I especially don’t like it when talking about injuries… it comes close to punning, because so many injuries involve impacts! But I guess this is another battle I am losing. When […]
Peer review and citations: Measuring research influence
I was tidying up the other day and came across an email from Caroline Finch with a link to a paper I had neglected. The paper “The Association between Four Citation Metrics and Peer Rankings of Research Influence of Australian Researchers in Six Fields of Public Health” was published in an open access journal. The […]