Scientific writing and publishing

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Scientific writing and publishing are part of everyday scientific work . Scientific writing is the aim and task of learning at universities, because scientific debates are mostly conducted in written form. It is a compositional process that means formulating research questions, developing hypotheses and checking them for plausibility, publishing the research results in scientific publications and making their relevance understandable for the general public.

The history of academic writing and publishing extends from ancient China and India through antiquity to the present day and over the centuries reflects the specific theoretical, technical and ideological characteristics of a time. Exclusion factors, for example, are still detectable today, especially in standardized publication procedures.

In the last few decades, new scientific genres have emerged, mainly due to changes in information technology for writing and publishing. In the case of open research (open science), scientific writing grows more and more together with publishing. Not least because of the possibilities of the Internet, the relationship between those who do science and the science publishers is changing, because research can more and more be published by oneself. Due to the greater interest in didactics and growing attention to career advancement, there is more information and debate about practical aspects of academic writing and publishing, which has made the topic relevant to various areas of society.

History since the 19th century

chronology

  • At the beginning of the 19th century, as part of the Humboldt university reform, a teaching method based on academic writing emerged in Germany . It was designed to complement the teaching methods of the lecture and the disputation . In high school organization departments have been introduced for this purpose, the seminar were called and possessed its own seminar libraries were equipped, in which students were able to see the original sources for their study work.
  • In 1906, the University of Chicago first issued formal guidelines known as The Chicago Manual of Style (16th Edition 2010).
  • The A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations by Kate L. Turabian has been published since 1937 , which refers to The Chicago Manual of Style and which, according to an estimate by the University of Chicago Press, has sold more than 8 million copies have been.
  • From 1946 the subject of rhetoric was developed at German-speaking universities . The first chair in general rhetoric was held in 1963 at the University of Tübingen , held by Walter Jens . There are now university events dedicated to science rhetoric in particular.
  • In 1959, the later Nobel Prize winner André Lwoff describes the current practice in the Bacteriological Review by saying that the success of science not only requires the right ideas and the right experiments to turn it into an essay, but that a coherent teaching body (“ a coherent doctrinal corpus ") and force it into magazines and textbooks."
  • From 1972 Donald E. Knuth developed the non-proprietary typesetting program LaTeX , which is now standard in scientific and technical fields.
  • In 1999 Georg Rückriem and Joachim Stary came to the conclusion during their review of German-language specialist literature that writing difficulties and blockages had been the subject of scientific research for a long time, but, as far as they knew, there was “no thorough book on their development”.
  • In 2001, scientists concluded the Budapest Open Access Initiative together (Boai) to achieve the goal of open access to peer-reviewed scientific literature on the Web, open access to realize. In 2003 the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Scientific Knowledge was signed by scientific institutions and associations .
  • The Journal of Academic Writing has been published since 2011 as a journal of the European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing (EATAW) , which also sponsors conferences on writing research that have existed since 2001.

German as a scientific language

In the early 19th century, the first scientific societies began to establish themselves in Germany and scientific journals were increasingly being published in German instead of Latin. In addition to French and English, German has also become an important scientific language internationally . At the moment, German is still to be found as an international scientific language, especially in humanities subjects. This applies primarily to German studies and other philologies, but also to philosophical, religious studies and some linguistic studies.

From German to English as an international scientific language

As a result of the persecution and expulsion of German-speaking scientists who went to English-speaking countries during the National Socialist era , knowledge production and international science communication shifted to English. In the years after 1945, this change also became a challenge for scientific publishers who had previously only marketed publications in German.

Writing in Practice

Scientific writing usually takes place alone and must be practiced as continuously as possible if it is to be effective writing. In addition, there are an increasing number of writing seminars and writing workshops inside and outside universities .

Scientific writing includes techniques such as citation and bibliography, and creative techniques to aid the writing process . The genres and formats in which they are written vary in their frequency depending on the subject. A distinction is also made as to whether it is more about writing down data generated elsewhere or whether the writing itself is viewed as scientific work.

A widely used software for writing and layout is LaTeX , a free typesetting program (a non-proprietary writing tool) that was created in 1972 and is suitable for large and complex texts that have to meet strict typographical requirements. With this program, the passages, headings, bibliographies, footnotes, mathematical formulas etc. to be formatted are textually supplemented with commands, from which the program then creates the desired layout for the publication.

Scientific style

Pierre Bourdieu counts on the scientific style of reviewing alternative positions in order to distance oneself from them. Or you discover a deficit with regard to the state of research or reflection in a certain branch of your own subject, in order to present yourself as the person who takes remedial action.

Scientific text production is based on extensive information acquisition and is usually part of a more comprehensive knowledge process, says Otto Kruse . From his point of view, the prerequisite for academic writing is above all a special knowledge base, you have to know the linguistic conventions and be aware that you are writing for special communicative contexts. Scientific style is also characterized by the fact that knowledge is factually justified and the structure of what is written is transparent. In contrast, reviews of new publications in the press, for example, want to be not only informative but also entertaining and are written in a columnar style.

For Hartmut von Hentig , science means, above all, the release and disqualification of knowledge. Those who write scientifically not only want to reproduce knowledge, but also to explain them and bring them to bear. However, this should not lead to “camouflaging” instruction or persuasion by using foreign language terms, employing complicated lines of thought and citing authorities. Because scientific prose is good if it is "above all simple and therefore clear."

Results of the PISA 2009 study in the natural sciences

The easier it is to understand a scientific paper, the easier it is for science journalists to transport it into the mass media. The prerequisite for their reception is a basic scientific education of the population, scientific literacy , which has been measured in recent years in several PISA studies in international comparison, for example for scientific performance.

Writing process and style

Among the writing process models , the theoretical works by Linda Flower and John R. Hayes on cognitive processes in writing are the best known. Flower and Hayes had their test subjects say out loud what they were thinking while they were writing, and using the evaluation results of the protocols they developed their model, which serves as the basis for theoretical considerations on overcoming writer's block .

In the writing process, rhetorical techniques are used for linguistic processing, says Gert Ueding , who refers to a quote by the physicist and aphorist Lichtenberg from the 18th century. Lichtenberg thinks that writing is ideally suited to “waking up” a “sleeping system”. Ueding is of the opinion that the cognitive process and the writing process take place at the same time, but that it is necessary for the exercise to separate the areas of finding things (inventio) and oratorical expression. Hartmut von Hentig quotes an answer from Hannah Arendt to the question of whether it is difficult for her to write (“But no, I just copy what I have in my head!”) And, in contrast, describes the consequences of his associative way of thinking : One of the reasons why he has a lot of trouble organizing his thoughts is that “there are always new ones coming to him.” For him, the thought only forms while writing, unlike Hannah Arendt. Writing is a self-education in intellectual honesty, a monologue in which you cannot fool yourself and learn to recognize and overcome your own scientific uncertainties, says the political scientist Ekkehart Krippendorff . Even if the framework and the substance of what you want to say is “ready in your head”, “a thought develops its own logic in the process of writing [...] You wanted to go straight ahead and realize that the goal is not so easy to achieve achieve, one must make detours [... whereby one] can also gain unexpected, sudden insights ”. According to Krippendorff's assessment, it is a compositional process in which the tools that are used have an impact on the content and structure of what is written.

Mediation of writing as scientific work

Writing is taught in universities using didactic genres such as seminar work or the thesis paper . This is based on the findings of Otto Kruse , who assumed that students could acquire their specialist knowledge and skills of academic writing at the same time.

In the commercial scientific writing workshops, students are supported in writing seminar, diploma, bachelor or master theses. Some writing workshops borrow from creative writing , a term for writing approaches that assume that writing is a creative- linguistic process that everyone can be methodically guided to. As a result, experiences from writing schools are transferred to the field of academic writing. Lutz von Werder explained this in more detail for the science sector .

If you want to publish your results, you also have to consider formal guidelines. Well-known guidelines are the work A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations (first edition 1937) by Kate L. Turabian , which is based on The Chicago Manual of Style , and the DIN standard DIN 1505-2 , in the Formats for literature compilations, bibliographies and footnotes have been standardized. But publishers often make their own specifications for text form, citation style and image formats, depending on the subject, genre and language. In the course of the Open Research movement, the recognition of internationally accepted standards is required on the part of the publishers, so that there is no longer any unnecessary extra effort for the actual producers of the knowledge when submitting them.

In 2013 there were writing centers in German-speaking countries at at least 30 universities, and two different writing centers at the universities of Münster, Göttingen and Tübingen, one of which is subject-related and the other interdisciplinary. There are six didactic writing conferences. One of them is the peer writing tutor conference, which was started in 2008 at the Viadrina University in Frankfurt / Oder, is mainly organized and designed by student writing advisors and takes place annually in a different writing center.

Scientific text forms

There are many scientific text forms and they differ not only in their form, but above all in their function.

Technical and strategic writing innovations

The text generation of knowledge bases is distinguished for current information as machine Verschriftlichen. B. from databases or knowledge representations. In extreme cases, rough versions of texts can even be created automatically. This is relevant for some highly standardized, descriptive scientific genres, for example in the medical field.

Writing and publishing in various fields

Depending on the subject and genre, the proportion of writing down and argumentative writing varies. Writing down is a process in which previously measured data are noted, for example in a test protocol , or in which results are written down on the basis of previously collected data, for example in a questionnaire . In argumentative writing, on the other hand, the attempt is made to convince a fictional counterpart of a thesis and to substantiate it with scientific means. Both parts appear in almost every scientific work , not least in the genre of scientific reports and in an appraisal process such as peer review .

Mathematical evidence is also part of argumentative writing and the same grammar rules apply to formulas and equations as to words: "(...) in a math paper, formulas and equations follow the standard grammatical rules that apply to words." (Kevin P. Lee ).

In addition, the writing of academic texts has to do with more difficult legal aspects or claims, depending on the subject. However, knowledge of the right to quote , the copyright and exploitation regulations as well as the possibilities of open licenses for writing in all subject areas are part of the basic equipment. In addition to own knowledge production, this also applies, for example, to excerpts from works and illustrations that others have created and that are to be embedded in a publication. More specialized knowledge is required when it comes to a laboratory notebook , the contents of which are the basis for the award of a scientific discovery or a patent . In this area, strict guidelines have been enforced by the institutions at which the knowledge was acquired. The situation is similar with new knowledge that must be kept secret due to contractual conditions, for example in armaments research and other industrially motivated third-party funding provisions, on the basis of which publicly funded knowledge generation is often privatized.

Using the example of subjects that publish at PLOS , a new format for citations has been developed since October 2014: “rich citation”. The format should contain the possibility for more information than before, regarding the citing and the cited entities. For example, the license under which the named source was published is to be recorded. Further aspects are provided that make the connection between the two entities clearer and that are suitable for increasing the transparency of the collaborations in the scientific network (making it easier to locate self-citation). Positioning in the text, amount and type of citation should also be included in this format.

Publishing in practice

The purpose of publishing is to convey newly acquired knowledge to the specialist public or to the general public (see also: science communication ). A scientific publication is usually discussed beforehand within a project group or presented for discussion in the form of a lecture at various conferences and only then published or submitted for review . Scientific writing for an assessment is usually not remunerated, as it is assumed that the work is part of another well-paid job. Inquiries from publishers can be rejected.

In some cases, a fake is not recognized in the peer review process . In many cases, however, authors receive important suggestions for revisions in a partially anonymous review phase, which can occasionally be read in acknowledgments. It happens that publications are prevented by the chosen supervisor or by external reviewers, for example due to undesirable results. The completion is sometimes deliberately delayed until one's own work on the topic has been successfully published, with the aim of being able to demonstrate that a certain knowledge was published first.

Recent developments

A more recent development in scientific publication is the emergence of online platforms in competition with or as a supplement to the traditional forms of publication in scientific journals by scientific publishers. Those platforms that succeed in attracting academic users offer the prospect of being able to produce standard scientific formats as a result of contributions, as is the case with paper in scientific fields. This is the assessment made by Michael Nielsen in his analysis in Reinventing Discovery. The new era of networked science from 2012.

Over the past 20 years, the " Open Access " movement has developed in scientific circles, including university librarians. Its aim is to make peer-reviewed scientific documents available free of charge to all people with web access: for reading, downloading, saving, linking and printing. Several national and international alliances have emerged, such as B. the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and the Action Alliance Copyright for Education and Science . A well-known declaration is the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Scientific Knowledge of October 22, 2003, which was preceded by the Budapest Open Access Initiative in December 2001 .

See also

literature

  • Irene L. Clark, Betty Bamberg: Concepts in composition. Theory and practice in the teaching of writing. 2nd Edition. Routledge, New York 2012, ISBN 978-0-415-88516-4 . (Disclose the concepts they are working with)
  • Einar H. Fredriksson (Ed.): A century of science publishing. A collection of essays. IOS Press et al., Amsterdam 2001, ISBN 1-58603-148-1 . (Table of contents) (Mostly articles from the perspective of the science publishing industry)
  • Otto Kruse: Don't be afraid of the blank sheet. Without writer's block through studies. 12th, completely revised edition. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-593-38479-5 . (Table of Contents) (German-language standard work on academic writing)
  • Teaching academic writing in European higher education , edited by Lennart A. Björk, Gerd Bräuer, Lotte Rienecker and Peter Stray Jörgensen, Kluwer Academic Publishing, 2003 Table of contents , ISBN 978-1-4020-1208-2
  • Wolf-Dieter Narr, Joachim Stary (Ed.): Lust and burden of scientific writing. University professors give students tips. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-518-29037-1 . (In addition to generally applicable articles, it also contains subject-specific articles on mathematics, German studies, physics, geology, economics and law)
  • Lutz von Werder: Creative writing in the sciences for schools, universities and adult education. Schibri-Verlag, Berlin / Milow 1992, ISBN 3-928878-00-X . (German-language standard work on academic writing, basis for later titles by the same author)
  • Gert Ueding: The rhetoric of writing. An introduction. 4th edition. Beltz Athenaeum, Weinheim 1996, ISBN 3-89547-102-X .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Purves, AC: Composition instruction , in: The international encyclopedia of curriculum , ed. By Arieh Lewy, Pergamon Press, New York, 1991, ISBN 0-08-041379-X , pp. 529-532. P. 529
  2. Amber E. Budden, Tom Tregenza, Lonnie W. Aarssen, Julia Koricheva, Roosa Leimu, Christopher J. Lortie: Double-blind review favors increased representation of female authors. (PDF) In: Trends in Ecology and Evolution. Vol. 23, No. 1, 2007, pp. 4-6.
  3. a b Einar H. Fredriksson: Foreword. In: Einar H. Fredriksson (Ed.): A century of science publishing. A collection of essays. IOS Press et al., Amsterdam 2001, ISBN 1-58603-148-1 , pp. Vii-viii. (Contents)
  4. a b Office for University Didactics at the University of Zurich, Scientific Writing and Student Learning ( Memento from September 12, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF), September 2007.
  5. ^ The Chicago Manual of Style , copyright notice
  6. For example at the Ruhr University Bochum, Rhetoric of Science / Wissenschaftsrhetorik
  7. Quoted from Ludwik Fleck : “Crisis in Science. Towards a free and human science ”(1960), in: Ludwik Fleck: Thought styles and facts. Collected writings and certificates . Edited and commented by Sylwia Werner and Claus Zittel. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-518-29553-3 , pp. 466-474.
  8. Georg Rückriem, Joachim Stary: Scientific writing: some (partly annotated) references for students. In: Wolf-Dieter Narr , Joachim Stary (ed.): Lust and burden of scientific writing. University professors give students tips. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-518-29037-1 , pp. 261-277.
  9. ^ Dan Wu: Introducing writing across the curriculum into China. Feasibility and adaptation. Springer, Heidelberg 2013, ISBN 978-3-642-33095-7 , p. 1
  10. ^ A b Peter Watson: The German genius. Europe's third renaissance, the second scientific revolution, and the twentieth century , [2010], Simon & Schuster, London 2011, ISBN 978-1-4165-2615-5 , p. 829 and Introduction.
  11. a b Ulrich Ammon: About German as a scientific language. June 2010.
  12. ^ Ekkehardt Hundt: German Post-WWII Developments and Changes in the Language of Science. In: Einar H. Fredriksson (Ed.): A century of science publishing. A collection of essays. IOS Press et al., Amsterdam, 2001, ISBN 1-58603-148-1 , pp. 97-108. (Contents)
  13. Gert Ueding: Rhetoric of writing. An introduction. 4th edition. Beltz Athenaeum, Weinheim 1996, ISBN 3-89547-102-X , p. 17.
  14. Pierre Bourdieu: Sentence and Contrast. About the responsibility of the intellectual. Wagenbach, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-8031-5120-1 , p. 8.
  15. Valentin Groebner : Historical anthropology on this side and beyond the scientific rhetoric: A place, somewhere? In: Historical Anthropology. Volume 10, Issue 2 (August 2002), pp. 303-304.
  16. ^ Otto Kruse: Scientific text composition. In: Don't be afraid of the blank sheet. Without writer's block through studies. 8th edition. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 3-593-36659-2 , chap. 4th
  17. Janine Hauthal: The review as an introduction to scientific writing and publishing. In: Ansgar Nünning, Roy Sommer (Hrsg.): Handbuch Promotion. Research - funding - financing. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2007, ISBN 978-3-476-02011-6 , p. 206.
  18. a b Hartmut von Hentig: A non-teachable art. In: Wolf-Dieter Narr, Joachim Stary (ed.): Lust and burden of scientific writing. University professors give students tips. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-518-29037-1 , pp. 19-26, p. 25.
  19. Barbara Späker: Two models of writing ─ Writing process and writing development models in comparison. (PDF), 2006.
  20. ^ Leigh MacKay: A Summary of Linda Flower and John R. Hayes' "A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing".
  21. Gert Ueding: Rhetoric of writing. An introduction. 4th edition. Beltz Athenaeum, Weinheim 1996, ISBN 3-89547-102-X , pp. 64–65.
  22. Ekkehart Krippendorff: Writing - with paper and ballpoint pen. In: Wolf-Dieter Narr, Joachim Stary (ed.): Lust and burden of scientific writing. University professors give students tips. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-518-29037-1 , pp. 27-35.
  23. s. literature
  24. s. literature
  25. Example: Nature.com For Authors - Manuscript formatting guide.
  26. Ella Grieshammer, Franziska Liebetanz, Nora Peters, Jana Zegenhagen: Zukunftsmodell Schreibberatung: Instructions for accompanying writers during their studies , 2nd, corrected edition, Schneider Verlag Hohengehren, Baltmannsweiler 2013 table of contents , ISBN 978-3-8340-1179-4 , Pp. 276-277.
  27. Michael Klemm, Monika Hähnel: "Scientific text forms from A - Z (cf. also Stary / Kretschmer 1994)", in: Materials for scientific writing / working (PDF), Writing Center of the Department of German Studies at Chemnitz University of Technology [no year], Pp. 10-11
  28. Irene L. Clark: Writing the successful thesis and dissertation. Entering the conversation , Table of Contents , Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2007, ISBN 0-13-173533-0 , page xxi.
  29. ^ Judith Wolfsberger: The freedom to work on just one detail of the topic. Focus everything on one question. In: Freely written. Courage, freedom and strategy for academic theses. 3. Edition. Böhlau / UTB, Stuttgart 2010, ISBN 978-3-8252-3218-4 , ISBN 978-3-8252-2424-0 , pp. 77-85.
  30. Institute for Genetics at the University of Cologne, Biology I / B, Anja Neuber: The protocol to AV - an exercise in scientific writing , summer semester 2014 ( Memento from July 14, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  31. Scientific work. Science, sources, artifacts, organization, presentation Helmut Balzert, Christian Schäfer, Marion Schröder, Uwe Kern; Participation: Roman Bendisch, Klaus Zeppenfeld. W3L-Verlag, Witten / Herdecke 2008 Table of contents , ISBN 978-3-937137-59-9 .
  32. K. Welkert-Schmitt and G. Schmitt: Self-management for students - transcripts
  33. Lecture transcripts are called postscript if they serve as a scientific textual basis for work editions , for example in Hegel , cf. Annette Sell: " Variants on / the Hegelian logic", in: Variants - Variants - Variantes , edited by Christa Jansohn and Bodo Plachta. Niemeyer, Tübingen 2005, ISBN 3-484-29522-8 , pp. 167-176.
  34. ^ Wiebke Ramm, Claudia Villiger: Scientific text production and specialist domain - Linguistic realization of scientific content in various specialist disciplines and their computer linguistic modeling. (PDF), In: Dagmar Knorr, Eva-Maria Jakobs (Hrsg.): Text production in electronic environments. Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-631-30970-8 , pp. 205-219.
  35. Kevin P. Lee: A Guide to Writing Mathematics. (PDF), upload on January 7, 2010.
  36. ^ Cf. Robert B. Laughlin : The crime of reason. Fraud in the knowledge society . edition unseld, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-26002-9 . (Contents)
  37. ^ Adam Becker: Rich Citations: Open Data about the Network of Research , plos.org , October 22, 2014
  38. Isabell Lorey, Otto Penz, Gerald Raunig, Birgit Sauer, Ruth Sonderegger, “Death struggles of the publishing industry? Experiences of a small multitude ” (example of a mail exchange), transversal.at , edition 06/2014: Uprising of the misplaced
  39. Michael A. Nielsen: Reinventing discovery. The new era of networked science. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ et al. 2012, ISBN 978-0-691-14890-8 , p. 9. (Table of Contents)