Anatomy and physiology of a scientific paper

Writing and publishing a scientific paper in academic journals is a highly competitive, time-consuming stepwise process. The road to scientific writing and publication is rarely straightforward. Scientific writing has uniform format, which is perplexing for the novice science writers due to its inflexible anatomy (structure) and physiology (functions). Many obstacles are allied with the scientific writing path which can be minimized by applying some simple guidelines and practices. The scientific papers have an almost similar format but, original articles are divided into distinct sections and each segment contains a specific type of information. The basic anatomy of scientific papers is mainly comprised of the structure of the various components of a scientific paper, including title, abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, conclusion, acknowledgments and references. However, the physiology of a scientific paper is difficult to understand. Early career researchers and trainees may be less familiar with the various components of scientific papers. In this study, we applied an observational approach to describe the essential steps to facilitate the readers and writers to understand the basic characteristics, anatomy and physiology of writing the various sections of a scientific paper for an academic science journal.     

从编辑角度分析如何提高科技论文的质量

科技论文是科研成果交流和延续的载体,其质量是衡量个人、科研单位乃至国家学术水平的重要指标。文章根据科技论文的特点,结合多年从事科技期刊编辑工作的经验,从如何确保论文学术水平、选题方向和写作思路、杜绝学术不端、保护知识产权等方面进行了阐述,并就科技论文撰写过程中应该注意的几个问题：科技论文的层次结构、语言表达和写作水平、确保数据真实有效和可重复性、表格插图的规范使用、规范参考文献的著录格式,从编辑角度分析了如何提高科技论文的质量,以期为科技论文的撰写提供参考。     

DEFENDING THE DUTY TO RESEARCH?

In 2005, John Harris published a paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics in which he claimed that there was a duty to support scientific research. With Sarah Chan, he defended his claims against criticisms in this journal in 2008. In this paper I examine the defence, and claim that it is not powerful. Although he has established a slightly stronger position, it is not clear that the defence is sufficiently strong to show that there is a duty to support scientific research. Important questions about fairness, about rescue, and about the relationship between reasons and obligations to act can still be raised; and these questions are important enough to destabilize the defence.     

Editorial: Writing in Grana

It has been necessary to re-organize the production of GRANA. The following changes in publishing policy are the most important. 1. GRANA will continue to accept papers in its traditional field of interest, but in future, papers in the applied branches of Palynology, such as pollen-analytical studies, will also be published, as well as papers on other micropalae-ontological fields, in which the methods correspond to those used in palynological research (dinoflagellates, chitinozoa, diatoms, etc.). Only material that is obviously of international interest will be accepted. 2. From now on, there will be restrictions as to the length of a paper. Two types of contributions will be acceptable: Articles, containing 16 printed pages at the most, including the figures, and Notes, covering four printed pages at the most. The Notes will be given priority over the Articles, and will be included in the journal as soon as they have been scrutinized by a referee and prepared for publication by the editorial staff. Thus, the writing of Notes will be the quick way to secure publication in GRANA. The rest of this article gives the technical specifications of GRANA and also some instructions for authors.     

Inflated impact factors? The true impact of evolutionary papers in non-evolutionary journals

Amongst the numerous problems associated with the use of impact factors as a measure of quality are the systematic differences in impact factors that exist among scientific fields. While in theory this can be circumvented by limiting comparisons to journals within the same field, for a diverse and multidisciplinary field like evolutionary biology, in which the majority of papers are published in journals that publish both evolutionary and non-evolutionary papers, this is impossible. However, a journal's overall impact factor may well be a poor predictor for the impact of its evolutionary papers. The extremely high impact factors of some multidisciplinary journals, for example, are by many believed to be driven mostly by publications from other fields. Despite plenty of speculation, however, we know as yet very little about the true impact of evolutionary papers in journals not specifically classified as evolutionary. Here I present, for a wide range of journals, an analysis of the number of evolutionary papers they publish and their average impact. I show that there are large differences in impact among evolutionary and non-evolutionary papers within journals; while the impact of evolutionary papers published in multidisciplinary journals is substantially overestimated by their overall impact factor, the impact of evolutionary papers in many of the more specialized, non-evolutionary journals is significantly underestimated. This suggests that, for evolutionary biologists, publishing in high-impact multidisciplinary journals should not receive as much weight as it does now, while evolutionary papers in more narrowly defined journals are currently undervalued. Importantly, however, their ranking remains largely unaffected. While journal impact factors may thus indeed provide a meaningful qualitative measure of impact, a fair quantitative comparison requires a more sophisticated journal classification system, together with multiple field-specific impact statistics per journal.     

药学英语学术写作初探

在西方大学,写作常常被作为最重要的学科,每一门课都是一门写作课。但在中国,很多人认为,学术论文写作仅仅是从汉语到英语的翻译。因此,很多作者提交的论文存在很多问题。仅仅有少数专家和研究生在国外知名杂志发表文章。文章审稿者通常让作者把文章全部重写。本文目的旨在为药学专门用途英语写作课程提供设计思路。设计这类课程时,主要问题是分析学习者的特定需求。其他问题包括：目标、语法结构、习得技巧以及评估等。这篇文章在实验过程中采用图示训练法,评估方式采用形成性评估与终结性评估相结合的方式,通过援引药学英语专业写作课,将此课程作为个案研究,将各个问题逐一讨论,为药学英语学术写作课程提出建议。     

Editorial

Dear reader, dear colleagues all around the world,this is a personal declaration and a policy statement.Volume 52 of this journal appears in a different form. One of the elements which are most noticeable externally is the reduction of the non-English parts in the original article section, particularly the omission of the Zusammenfassungen and the Résumés. This change recognises the obvious fact that English has become the lingua franca of science today.This, however, does not justify to any extent ignoring papers in other languages. Since, for instance, the foundation of epigenetics has been first summarised by Le Double who wrote in French or since the first and most comprehensive papers on enamel hypoplasia were published by Berten in German, the author of a respective paper today must read French or German or obtain relevant translations. If he/she does not, then this work becomes seriously flawed in terms of one of the most important quality criteria for scientific work, the due acknowledgement of important existing contributions to the field. This criterion has been stressed by many compendia, laws and bylaws on ethical behaviour in science and is e.g. included in the Helsinki Declaration. If the author of a paper submitted to HOMO does not comply with the requirement of due acknowledgement of all contributions to the relevant field of work, irrespective of the language in which they were published, that paper will not pass the editorial review process in HOMO.A living language as the lingua franca poses, in contrast to the use of Latin in Mediaeval and Renaissance times, consequential problems: scientists from English speaking countries tend to disregard work produced in other cultures, the others, the vast majority of the world who do not speak English at home, tend to focus on the work of mother-tongue English writers. Both effects lead to a serious loss of ideas and a disregard of a substantial body of facts and data, and both are a violation of the internationality and openness of science.We recommend to every consumer of written science to check the percentage of non-English entries in the bibliography of a paper or a book. If there is not one: please ignore it, it is seriously biased.Naturally there are exceptions to this rule, e.g. simple basic lab reports and very young subfields like DNA method development. For the remainder, the bulk of serious scientific publication, this holds true. In comparative human biology at present about one-third of works quoted should be in languages other than English.This will obviously vary between subfields and character of contribution, and this percentage will reduce as the time goes on and most new works are published in English, but, as a rule, nil is bias.As always, the quality of papers submitted to HOMO will be judged on all sound scientific criteria. The fact that the editors and most of the board members of our journal are able to read papers in several languages other than English will help to maintain breadth and quality of our journal's content.Summer 2001Fw Rösing, Editor     

ICT for environment in life cycle applications openLCA — A new open source software for life cycle assessment

This paper is a two-fold introduction. For one, it introduces a new, open source, LCA software. Second, it is to establish a new section in Int J LCA named ‘LCA Software’. Herewith, the editors of the journal recognise the growing possibilities and the impact of software, meaning both databases and calculation as well as modelling software, for practical applications as well as for the scientific development in LCA. This section is designed to house a broad variety of papers to beLCA focused and related to ICT (Information and Communication Technology). In this sense, announcements (as this one), conference reports, but also peer-reviewed papers on methodology and case studies, are most welcome.     

Phylogenetic signals in thermal traits remain stronger in the tropics if we can believe published physiological data. A reply to McKechnie et al., “Data quality problems undermine analyses of endotherm upper critical temperatures”

Due to concerns about data quality, McKechnie, Coe, Gerson, and Wolf ( 2016 ) questioned the conclusions of our study (Khaliq et al., 2015 ) published in this journal. Here, we argue that most of the questioned data points are in fact useful for macrophysiological analyses, mostly because the vast majority of data are explicitly reported in the peer‐reviewed physiological literature. Furthermore, we show that our conclusions remain largely robust irrespective of the data inclusion criterion. While we think that constructive debates about the adequate use of primary data in meta‐studies as well as more transparency in data inclusion criteria are indeed useful, we also emphasize that data suitability should be evaluated in the light of the scope and scale of the study in which they are used. We hope that this discussion will not discourage the exchange between disciplines such as biogeography and physiology, as this integration is needed to address some of the most urgent scientific challenges.     

New journal: Algorithms for Molecular Biology

This editorial announces Algorithms for Molecular Biology, a new online open access journal published by BioMed Central. By launching the first open access journal on algorithmic bioinformatics, we provide a forum for fast publication of high-quality research articles in this rapidly evolving field. Our journal will publish thoroughly peer-reviewed papers without length limitations covering all aspects of algorithmic data analysis in computatioal biology. Publications in Algorithms for Molecular Biology are easy to find, highly visible and tracked by organisations such as PubMed. An established online submission system makes a fast reviewing procedure possible and enables us to publish accepted papers without delay. All articles published in our journal are permanently archived by PubMed Central and other scientific archives. We are looking forward to receiving your contributions.     

Case studies in reproducibility

Reproducible research is a concept of providing access to data and software along with published scientific findings. By means of some case studies from different disciplines, we will illustrate reasons why readers should be given the possibility to look at the data and software independently from the authors of the original publication. We report results of a survey comprising 100 papers recently published in Bioinformatics. The main finding is that authors of this journal share a culture of making data available. However, the number of papers where source code for simulation studies or analyzes is available is still rather limited.     

Problems in the Psychology of Development (Reading O. Mandel'shtam)

In August of this year, our regular author V.P. Zinchenko celebrated his sixtieth birthday. The editorial board asked him to give an interview about his view of the contemporary science of psychology. Vladimir Petrovich preferred a series of articles on the eternal problems of developmental psychology. We publish the first of these articles, written in the genre of an essay on scientific themes, in this journal issue. But the editorial board did not abandon its request, and hopes that his interview on the science of psychology will be published in the journal. The editorial board congratulates V.P. Zinchenko on his birthday and wishes him success in his scientific work.     

Is There a Relationship between Research Sponsorship and Publication Impact? An Analysis of Funding Acknowledgments in Nanotechnology Papers

This study analyzes funding acknowledgments in scientific papers to investigate relationships between research sponsorship and publication impacts. We identify acknowledgments to research sponsors for nanotechnology papers published in the Web of Science during a one-year sample period. We examine the citations accrued by these papers and the journal impact factors of their publication titles. The results show that publications from grant sponsored research exhibit higher impacts in terms of both journal ranking and citation counts than research that is not grant sponsored. We discuss the method and models used, and the insights provided by this approach as well as it limitations.