Yesterday, a PhD student asked me for advice on how to chose the title of his paper. He works on cicadas, but he noted that many papers that deal with a specific family / group don’t use the name of this group in the title, but rather phrase the problem more broadly. To give a…
Two weeks ago, for the second time in this semester, I taught a block course on “research skills” for students in our international master programs here at the faculty. Topics were how to develop a hypothesis, design experiments, do analysis, write it down, do graphs etc. It believe these courses have been a quite a…
“I have long discovered that geologists never read each other’s works, and that the only object in writing a book is a proof of earnestness, …” CHARLES DARWIN TO J.M. HERBERT. Down [1844 or 1845], Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (Project Gutenberg ebook), p.347
Staying with the topic of publishing: when PeerJ was announced last year (see e.g. a Nature News feature), I was a bit skeptical about how this would go, but I have to admit that my impression about the first articles that have been put online this week is quite positive. Not only are there catchy…
If you want to get published, then heed this advice: Cite your friends at least once and your enemies twice, The editor three times, yourself at least four, And write in a style that’s intended to bore. If you want to get published, here’s what you must do Above all: don’t come up with anything…
Conventional wisdom has it that paper titles must be catchy to attract the readers attention. But what makes a catchy title? What one finds increasingly in the academic literature are patterns like INTERESTING SENTENCE THAT COULD MEAN ANYTHING*: BUT WHAT DID WE REALLY DO? (I admit to being a culprit myself). The hope here is…
One of the things that you obviously need in science is a good name (not your reputation, I mean the actual name). This is true for the art of acronymia, as illustrated by the ingenious Jorge Cham above, but also for your core business, your articles. Names are everything. After all, remember that by far…
theoretical ecology 