Patience / Boffito Communicate Science Papers, Presentations, and Posters Effectively

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-0-12-801709-8
Verlag: Elsevier Science & Techn.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 284 Seiten

Communicate Science Papers, Presentations, and Posters Effectively is a guidebook on science writing and communication that professors, students, and professionals in the STEM fields can use in a practical way. This book advocates a clear and concise writing and presenting style, enabling users to concentrate on content. The text is useful to both native and non-native English speakers. The book includes chapters on the publishing industry (discussing bibliometrics, h-indexes, and citations), plagiarism, and how to report data properly. It also offers practical guidance for writing equations and provides the reader with extensive practice material consisting of both exercises and solutions. - Covers how to accurately and clearly exhibit results, ideas, and conclusions - Identifies phrases common in scientific literature that should never be used - Discusses the theory of presentation, including 'before and after examples highlighting best practices - Provides concrete, step-by-step examples on how to make camera ready graphs and tables

Dr. Gregory S. Patience is a Canada Research Chair and Professor of Chemical Engineering at Polytechnique Montr‚al, Canada. Before joining academia, he held various research positions in industry related to catalyst manufacture, process design, technical marketing and management with Du Pont de Nemours & Co. in the USA, Spain, and Switzerland. Language fascinated him, so after his M.Sc. at the University of Calgary he moved to Montreal and became proficient in French while completing his PhD at Polytechnique. Since then he mastered Spanish, and then studied Italian while he lived in Geneva. He has consulted for major corporations - Total, Haldor-Tops›e, Arkema - and several start-ups that have resulted in a dozen patents. Along with more than 100 journal articles and book chapters, Professor Patience has presented his work at numerous conferences and developed courses on fluidization, reactor design, process design, and textiles manufacturing

Autoren/Hrsg.

Patience, Gregory S.

Boffito, Daria C.

Patience, Paul

Leseproben

Chapter 1

Publishing Industry

Abstract

Writing well is as much art as it is science. Captivating your audience such that the audience members read your entire article is art. Following a rigorous method and respecting predefined structure is…science. It takes practice, effort, and time to write well—any sentence can take what seems like hours. The immediate reward for all your toil and trouble is when an editor accepts your manuscript. We say that

– you are not working if you don’t write; but in fact,

– you are not working if you don’t publish; furthermore,

– you are not working if your papers aren’t cited.

you are not working if you don’t write; but in fact,

you are not working if you don’t publish; furthermore,

you are not working if your papers aren’t cited.

Journals compete to attract the best papers to improve their reputation and increase readership. The prestigious journals attract the best papers, and thereby maintain their stature.

Keywords

Impact factor

Hirsch index (h5)

Web of Science

Google Scholar

Bibliometric indicators

Citations

Rankings

? factor

Scientific categories

Tsallis power law distribution

Chapter Outline

1.1 Bibliometrics  2

Country Scientific Productivity   4

University Ranking   4

1.2 Citation Indices  6

1.3 Scientific Categories—Disciplines  8

1.4 Citations  9

Scientific Category (?26,0.1)   10

1.5 Journal Prestige  12

Impact Factor   13

h-Index   14

IF/SJR Versus h-Index   15

1.6 Article Citations  18

Classifying Articles—?t,?  21

Increasing Citations   22

1.7 Personal Citation Reports  23

Funding   23

Metrics   24

1.8 Exercises  25

Writing well is as much art as it is science. Captivating your audience such that they read your entire article is art. Expressing ideas precisely in a systematic sequence and a logical structure is…science. It takes practice, effort, and time to write well—any sentence can take what seems like hours. The immediate reward for all your toil and trouble is when an editor accepts your manuscript.

You have to communicate your research: if you are not writing, you are not working. Editors publish work that is original, important, clear, and relevant to their journal and reject papers that don’t meet these criteria. Science (2014) rejects 93% of the manuscripts it receives. The rejection rate is increasing across all journals (Kamat and Schaltz, 2014).

The first hurdle in the publishing process is getting past editorial assistants, who check for English quality, topic suitability, figure format, plagiarism, and overall look. Only one in five submissions gets to the editor (Science, 2014). This book will help you get past editorial assistants. We anticipate that it will also help convince the editor, the second hurdle, to send your work for review. Editors check the abstract, introduction, conclusions, and pertinence of the references. The letter to the editor describes why the work is important, how it is original, and why you are sending it to the journal you have selected (Soares and Thomas, 2014). If you don’t address these points, your chances that the editor will take the time to send the manuscript to reviewers are slim.

The reviewers are the final hurdle: They examine the scientific content and consider how well you wrote the paper. If they can understand it, they can assess its significance and will be more inclined to accept it with minor revisions. Don’t despair if they reject it. Address the reviewers’ and editors’ comments. Spend more time improving the paper and resubmit it to another journal in the same journal community. When the paper finally gets accepted, it will likely be cited more (Calcagno et al., 2012).

The end of the grueling publishing process is the satisfaction of seeing your work in a journal. Equally gratifying is to know that other people read it and cite it.

Here we present bibliometric indicators that gauge the extent of your contribution and prestige. We discuss the h-index for individuals and journals, as well as the IF. We introduce the ?t,? factor to assign a rank to papers, to individuals, and even to scientific categories.

1.1 Bibliometrics

Bibliometric indicators—how many articles you publish, how many people cite these articles, and the journals that publish your work—are important for academic careers. Institutions rely on them when they hire and promote professors and research staff. These metrics help universities, governments, and corporations allocate funding and identify emerging and desirable research disciplines (Vieira and Gomes, 2010). Furthermore, they gauge the productivity of individuals, they quantify the impact of a university or a department, and they provide input for ranking both individuals and universities or departments. Students apply to highly ranked universities first, so these institutes select from among the best candidates. Choosing the best students helps maintain the institutes’ productivity, prestige, and reputation.

University enrolment continues to increase, along with the number of scientific journals and the number of papers they publish. In 1990, Web of ScienceTM (WoS) (2014) indexed 920 000 new papers; in 2000, it indexed 1 300 000 new papers (Figure 1.1). In the following decade, the publication rate increased by 80 000 new articles per year, and in 2009 WoS indexed 2 million documents for the first time. It has more than 39 million documents dating from the beginning of 1989 to the end of 2014. The publication rate is increasing all over the world, and China has made the most progress.

Figure 1.1 The number of articles appearing in WoS has been generally increasing year after year since 1989. In 2014, the number of new papers dropped by 277 000 versus 2013.

The most important bibliometric indicators are the number of papers and the number of citations per paper. How do these translate to a researcher’s prestige, impact, or success? After 5 years, if you publish 15 articles and 500 people cite your work, are you successful? The advantage of bibliometric indicators is that they are concrete numbers. They are open to public scrutiny and are relatively unbiased. The weakness of bibliometric indicators is that they are thus far inadequate to compare the performance of individuals across disciplines. Furthermore, the number of papers and the number of citations might not always correlate with the importance or the impact of the contribution. However, the advantages of assessing performance with indicators outweigh the drawbacks.

We classify performance as good, very good, excellent, and outstanding, which corresponds to a classification in the top 50%, 25%, 10%, and 1%, respectively (Table 1.1). Of the papers published 20 years ago, 50% have at least 10 citations (?1,50(1994) = 10), 10% have at least 60 citations (?1,10(1994) = 60), and 0.1% have at least 750 citations (?1,0.1(1994) = 750). Several factors influence how many people read and cite papers. Articles in journals with high impact factors (IFs) are, by definition, cited more than those with low IFs. Science and Nature are high IF journals (over 30). The top 10% of journals have IFs over 4. The most prolific writers (and citers) are in the medical sciences and physics, whereas the least prolific are in the social sciences and mathematics. The top disciplines have at least 300 papers with 300 citations (h5-index of 300); half of the scientific categories have at least 66 articles with at least 66 citations (h5 = 66).

Table 1.1

Bibliometric Parameters of Excellence

Outstanding

<0.1 to...