Teaching how to publish

One aspect of science education that is largely underestimated in countries without a strong research infrastructure is that of teaching all those details that surround writing and publishing a scientific article. Some gifted scientists are able to organize their material and write their papers in a remarkable manner, without any special training, and almost always do it with a lot of care. But the large majority of science students and young researchers face tough times when being confronted with the need to demonstrate that they are able, not only to do research, obtain results and discuss them, but also to publish the material.

After all, research will not end until the results are published and made known to the scientific community. This community, in turn, has the responsibility of making them known to society at large.

The whole process begins at a desk located next to or at the laboratory, where the researcher and his team plan and execute their work, thereafter to compile, filter and present the results in the form of a scientific article to be submitted to a primary publication, a scientific journal. Very often, preliminary presentations are prepared in the form of congress summaries and presentations, posters and attendance to specialized conferences and symposia.

Graduate students and postdocs touch upon most or all of these activities at some time during their studies. However, few research institutions and universities care to provide a formal training in these matters, and even fewer do so in countries in which research in science and technology is not deeply rooted in society.

A particular complication arises from the fact that different scientific journals or meetings have different presentation rules to follow and are usually rather strict about them. Also, the ways in which people express themselves vary much more than one thinks it can. Background, training and general culture powerfully influence the expressive outcome of the individual.

Although science writing should be taught from school onwards, the preparation of a doctoral dissertation is the most important and, on many occasions, the only opportunity for a scientist-in-training to exercise his potential abilities and to confront teachers and colleges. In too many instances the experience ends up being a rather traumatic one. In cases of strong domination of the group by a senior scientist or cases of very small research groups the situation can be yet more extreme.

Perhaps the most significant way in which the scientific community has overcome the lack of specific training in matters of scientific writing and publication is by making use of the numerous writing guides and manuals published by individuals, institutions or editor societies, few of which are updated and readily available in Spanish.

An important initiative of the Pan American Health Organization has been to periodically publish translations of a classic in the genre, the book by Robert A. Day. The fourth Spanish edition, a translation of the sixth English edition, now authored by Day together with Barbara Gastel, has come out recently and is enthusiastically recommended to the regional science and technology community. This issue of Interciencia includes a commentary about this work in our Publications section.

Miguel Laufer,

Editor, Interciencia