Book Review 36

Review

Title: Writing Scientific Research Articles, Second Edition: Strategy and Steps

ISBN 13: 9781118507070

Published: 2013

Pages: 223

Cost: $29.95

Rating (1-5): 4

Submitted By: Chatterjee, Amitava

Date posted: August 05, 2013

Perfect textbook for graduate writing course

Writing is indispensable part of the researcher’s life. There are significant numbers of book available on writing research articles, proposal or grant writing. Some of these are discipline specific and some are general. It is a challenge to develop a common one for writing research manuscripts because styles and formats differ significantly. Margaret Cargill is an applied linguist with over 20 years’ experience as a research communication educator, and Patrick O’Connor is a research ecologist, environmental consultant and science educator. In ‘Writing Scientific Research Articles: Strategy and Steps’ Cargill and O’Connor have to some extent successfully explained the norms and tricks of effective writing skills. Second edition of this book made minor changes from the previous edition like, addition of a different format of article in chapter two and new chapters on writing review article and grant proposal. However, I have some comments and suggestions on improving the format of the book. First, I could not understand why authors follow an odd sequence of sections: results, methods, introduction, discussion, title, and abstract. May be authors were suggesting to follow this sequence when writing a manuscript. But, the reader probably will not read the chapter from your book and then write that particular section of the manuscript. Moreover, chapter 3 on reviewers’ criteria for evaluating manuscripts can be placed later on. It is important to know the content of individual section of the manuscript before the reviewer’s demand. Also, I suggest including how author(s) suggest reviewers during submission and ethics behind selection like, conflict of interest. Second, some chapters are so short like, chapter 4 and they can be merged easily into the following chapter as sub division. Separating those chapters is only increasing total number of pages. Third, keeping the same significant digit number throughout the paper and more information on different graph examples and maps or experimental designs should be included in chapter 5. Finally, I suggest authors to select a simple, easy to read paper as an example and it can be from low tier journals (all you want to do is introducing sections of the ideal paper, not the genetics or modeling!). If readers find it hard to understand the theme of the provided example article, then they will be reluctant to follow up with your task. I personally tried task 5.3 and found it hard. All three example papers are not suitable for learning different sections of the manuscript. Moreover, I suggest embedding different sections of the example paper in the respective chapter, not at the end. Students will hardly go back and forth to read the paper and following the chapter guidelines. However, I believe this book will be great for adoption in graduate level scientific writing course.