People who are heavier drinkers and live in low income communities are more likely to combine such drinking with other health damaging behaviors than people in wealthier communities. The issue of transparency and credit that research faces is not unique to research. We support the open badges infrastructure which allows anyone to display and exchange trusted digital credentials.

Sign up for the best job search and career tips and advice from alison, delivered straight to your inbox. For more help and advice, visit the about job search facebook page and connect with me: …modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. george orwell – politics and the english language 1946 the open access movement seeks to make research published in peer reviewed journals freely available for anyone to see. At the moment you have to pay through the nose to read a journal article if youre not at an institution with a subscription. The public fund much of the research that goes into peer reviewed journals, and therefore they have a right to see it should they want to 1. Open access is making excellent progress, and there are now many journals that are freely available online.

But there is another barrier preventing people from accessing published research, and that is academic writing. It is, at least in the sciences i havent read enough from other fields to make a judgement , poorly constructed, stale and pretentious. George orwell’s politics and the english language , despite being written nearly 70 years ago, is still the best guide to how not to write. Orwell argued that bad habits were developing in written english, and that these made writing ugly and inaccurate. Firstly, the points orwell makes on whats wrong with written english are still relevant today, especially in science writing. Secondly and more worryingly for me , i realised that i have developed every bad habit possible, and that my own scientific writing is indeed ugly and inaccurate. Orwell lists four main bad habits that he felt were prevalent in written english in 1940.

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Below, i explain three of them 2 and give some examples of how they are used in 21st century science writing. Then ill attempt to explain why i think its important that we scientists begin to change how we write. The examples that ill give below are not the worst examples of science writing, and i dont think that the authors are necessarily bad writers, nor that i am a good one. As i have said, many of the problems that ill discuss come up in my own work, and probably in this blog post. The scientists who wrote these papers, like myself and the majority of academics, have picked up bad habits because they have attempted to write in the journal style something ill discuss later. If you are the author of a paper that i mention, or if the criticism i make reminds you of your own writing, i dont mean to offend, but i dont apologise if i do. Dying metaphors a dying metaphor, according to orwell, is one that is neither useful for evoking an image, nor one that has become a meaningful phrase in its own right.

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They are worn out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. In science writing, dying metaphors can be most easily seen in journal article titles. The other trend that you will have probably noticed in these article titles is the use of the colon. Based on a sample of 100 articles published in my field mhc evolution since 2009, 23% of papers use colons in the title. I myself have been guilty of this, but will not do so again although, i may be tempted to write an article called punctuation in article titles: time for a colonic irrigation.

Its not only lazy and repetitive using colons in your titles also gets you fewer citations. In case you think i am making too much of article titles, lazy imagery is not restricted to these. Think how often you have seen phrases such as cutting edge 1,640,0 google scholar hits , achilles heel 79,300 hits , shed ding light 492,0 hits and holy grail 82,200 hits. Many of the examples that orwell used in his essay are still used in science papers, be subjected to, have the effect of, serve the purpose of , and numerous others can be found, such as gives rise to, take into account, give the impression that, may be of interest, in addition to and so on.

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Examples of this include to our knowledge, this is the first time that, and the ridiculous not un formation, which, embarrassingly, can still be found in many science articles usually in the form of not uncommon or not unlikely, when trying to understate how common/likely something is. In the past, journals have insisted on the passive voice in methods sections, arguing that they would like papers to have an air of objectivity. This is nonsense whether science is performed well comes down to how it performed, not whether it is dressed up in flowery language.

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Methods sections written entirely in the passive voice are usually extremely awkward and difficult to read, and more worryingly, they can be be misleading methods were selected, data were omitted. There is a long history of argument for and against the passive voice in argument, which i wont go over here this web page already does a pretty good job of that. The passive voice neednt be eliminated entirely from science papers, but i do think we should be using the active voice much, much more. Pretentious diction pretentious diction is probably the biggest problem in modern science writing. Like verbal filler and the passive voice, pretentious words are used to give the impression of scientific objectivity. Examples include ameliorate, elucidate, a priori /a posteriori, utilise, parallel, assumption, furthermore, comparative ly , exacerbate, heterogeneous, determinant usually preceded by multiple , facilitate, etc.

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They are usually latinate words which have perfectly good everyday equivalents not to be confused with jargon, which is often necessary although i think overused. Why should we care? science is about finding the truth and making sense of things. The structure, grammar and choice of words used in science articles makes them vague and inaccurate, which is exactly the opposite of how they are intended, and pretend, to be.