jeff smith

I’ve learnt my lesson for the day: even if a reviewer is just plain wrong, what you do in response can still improve the paper. And maybe even show you something new about your own data.

I’m revising a paper about my older work with plasmids. One of the reviewers, a theoretician (they wrote their review in TeX), thinks the paper “is really lacking a serious mathematical and statistical modeling effort”. And here I was happy to finally have a paper with no math in it! They don’t think it’s clear that my data support the conclusions I make, though it seems obvious enough to me. Plus, they want me to use a specific modelling method I think is seriously questionable.

At first I was upset at having to spend a bunch of time and effort responding to reviewer comments that were wrong and weren’t going to improve the paper. But then, in the process of doing some math to address a question from the other (more sensible) reviewer, I realized I could extend the math and show, quantitatively, how competing evolutionary hypotheses make different predictions about what should happen in my experiments. In the end, not only am I able to show that my data reject one hypothesis but are consistent with another, but I’m also able to explain the specific shape of my data—something I’d never even attempted to do. I’m actually surprised it fits so well.

So there you go. Score another one for peer review. It’s even better than the peers doing the reviewing.

Well, it worked.  Science officially accepted “A generalization of Hamilton’s rule for the evolution of microbial cooperation” by jeff smith, J. David Van Dyken, and Peter Zee.  First and senior author on a paper in one of the most prominent journals in all of science…  You can’t see it, but I’m doing a little victory dance right now.  It’s especially sweet because I really think this paper deserves a high profile — it’s not just spin and luck.

But we did have decent luck with reviewers.  Their questions, comments, and suggestions helped improve the paper, even if we didn’t always agree with them.  Two of the three were totally on board with what we were trying to do and how we were doing it.  The third mainly took issue with some of our stronger statements knocking Hamilton’s rule.  Worse would’ve been a reviewer antagonistic to our research program or a reviewer that just didn’t get the point, for whatever reason.  In the end, we clarified the problems we had with Hamilton’s rule, toned down our rhetoric somewhat, and that was enough.  I get the impression that many papers in these journals go through a similar cycle — they start out boldly stated to make it to full review (“An accurate replacement for…”), then get toned down on revision (“A generalization of…”).

I’ve been helping a friend who’s writing their first scientific papers. Scientists almost always read papers for the content and pay little attention to the craft of what they’re reading. So when it comes to writing your own for the first time, it’s not always obvious how to proceed.

It helps to know that most scientific writing is pretty formulaic. Journal articles and grant applications have a pretty set structure that journals and funding agencies expect you to follow. The abstract/introduction/methods/results/discussion format is pretty ingrained these days. Even within those sections there are standard ways of doing things. Nature, for example, gives authors a sentence-by-sentence template to follow in their abstracts. Only in review articles or perspective pieces do you have much leeway in terms of large-scale organization.

In a way, scientific writing is like Bebop. Bebop song structures are pretty rigid and predictible. It’s always head/solos/head. The creativity is all in the melody, the chord changes, and the solos. For scientists, the interesting part of a paper isn’t the writing or organization—it’s the experiments, the results, and what they say about the natural world. Everything else is secondary.

Normally when you submit a paper to a journal, you include a cover letter as a kind of formality. It’s the equivalent of a handshake and an exchange of basic information: number of words in the paper, suggestions for reviewers, contact information, stuff like that. With prominent journals, though, these cover letters are a Big Deal. Most submissions to Science and Nature don’t even get sent out for review, and the cover letter is where you make the case that your paper is interesting and important enough to pass the first cut. The fate of your paper depends on less than a page of text that only a couple people may ever read. It’s crazy.

In preparation for our imminent submission, I read whatever I could find about these letters. Pamela Hines, senior editor of Science, gives a talk on how to publish in Science that I found useful. Some things these editors ask themselves when they get a submission are: How is this novel? Is it a big enough scientific advance? Is it widely interesting? They look for work that solves a long-standing problem, overturns conventional wisdom, or has wide implications. It’s your job to figure out what’s most interesting about your work to the largest number of people and put that front and center. It’s a kind of self-promotion that a lot of people find difficult.

Nature asks authors for a 100-word summary of their paper for nonscientists. I found a forum post by a Nature staffer claiming that these summaries aren’t actually used by the journal—they’re to help authors think about what makes their findings interesting to a wide audience. It’s funny, a little bit devious, and I think it works.

I’m of a mixed mind about the whole process. I can see how high non-review rates can lead to spin being valued more than content. In my field these journals have published several papers that really didn’t deserve such high visibility. But at the same time, I can see how revising my current manuscript with these journals in mind has made it a stronger, clearer work. I guess we’ll soon see if the editors agree.

We’ve been considering submitting one of our recent projects to one of the prominent journals (Science, Nature, PLoS Biology and so forth). The process is somewhat different than normal. Not just the formatting, but also the focus on how interesting the work is to people outside the field and to a non-science audience. I’m a bit averse to the press release, spin-heavy mentality that can go along with these things sometimes, but it has helped me focus better on the bigger picture.

Since this is my first time doing this sort of thing, it’s also been a little bit intimidating. I’ve found it helps to mentally compare our work with other related papers that have been published in these journals, rather than some imaginary standard. That helps.