Customer Reviews

Scientific Writing: Easy When You Know How

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have read the classic "How to write and publish a scientific paper" from Robert A. Day, before this one. I find Peat's book more usefull, because it drives you through the whole publication process. Structure of each section of a paper is widely described, and what is more important substructure within each section. The book also includes a lot of usefull web resources and information about specific publication guidelines depending on study design (CONSORT, QUORUM,...).
The only thing I missed is the sense of humor of Day's Book, and maybe more examples about making good tables, charts and figures, although some general rules are included in the text.
It's a great book, maybe one of the best about scientific writing.

3.5 stars
This book is heavily focused on writing clinical research including clinical research examples, with very little information specific to general research articles. Sections of the book focus on using the proper statistics (for clinical studies) data table design, and data organization, but had little to no information about generating other types of figures or writing non-clinical research articles.

This book also includes useful information about submitting your article, writing and responding to peer review, and having an article rejected. These sections were really more about getting published than actually writing. The short section on writing a post graduate dissertation did not include enough information to really be useful. Also, this is not a good recourse for specifics about grant writing.

The final sections of the book include information about actual writing, which didn't seem completely specific to scientific writing, but was all together useful. There are chapters on sentence structure, word choice, grammar, and punctuation. Each of these chapters contain numerous examples where example sentences are made more clear though the topic discussed in the chapter. Of course a lot of writing style even scientific writing is personal preference, so there are no hard and fast rules, but these sections give some good general advice and discuss many common word choice and grammar mistakes.

Overall, I found a lot of good suggestions and advice in this book, but it was also very dense and a little boring. The title and description suggested that the book would be about general scientific writing (many biomedical studies are not clinical trials or clinical studies), but the emphasis on clinical research left out important topics that would be useful to scientists writing other types of research papers.

This is a very simple yet comprehensive introductory book to scientific writing by experienced clinicians in this field (three paediatricians & one statistician). The book covers in some detail (1) what scientific writing is & why it is important to publish, (2) how to get started & finish the paper and (3) how the journal process & publishing work. The book also covers very well writing style, grammar, word choice, punctuation & supporting systems. This is a very simple yet concise & useful guide to scientific writing step by step, from start to finish with an extensive bibliography to boot including useful websites, a highly recommended reading!

Excellent resource which I have recommended to students and colleagues. When writers block strikes or looking for a starting formula dipping into this book helps make the path more clear. I also refer to the "companion" book Medical Statistics by Jennifer Peat - together these are always at hand when I want some practical advice. Not just what you should do but HOW to do it.