Editors' WebWatch is a section of European Science Editing, the journal of the European Association of Science Editors. The section is a membership-driven resource guiding editors and writers in the sciences to websites and services of interest.

Please send suggestions to Paola de Castro (ese.webwatch@gmail.com), who coordinates this section along with Colin Batchelor and Penny Hubbard.

Work in progress to be published in the journal can be viewed online in the EASE Journal Blog. WebWatch entries are marked 'W' in the blog.

You can join the blog posters by contacting paola.decastro@iss.it. We look forward to your contributions.

The WebWatch items below are from the August 2008 issue of European Science Editing (vol. 34, no. 3). For articles from previous issues, please see the Editors' WebWatch Archive page.

August 2008

Are you correcting what isn’t even wrong?
www-csli.stanford.edu/~zwicky/

Arnold Zwicky, who you will have heard of if you read Language Log (www.languagelog.org), which was mentioned in a WebWatch column a few issues ago, is interested in the advice literature, and has taught on the subject.

Hopefully we all know that using hopefully as I’ve just used it is OK, infinitives can be split, prepositions can appear at the end of sentences, there is nothing necessarily wrong with dangling modifiers and so forth. There’s lots of interesting discussion of all of these, and a few more that I’d never seen before, like the baffling possessive antecedent proscription, which tells you that this sentence:

Toni Morrison’s genius enables her to create novels that arise from and express the injustices African Americans have endured.

contains a mistake.


Oh dear
http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/exercisecentral/
http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/rewriting/ge3.html

These sites for improving your grammar were mentioned on www.stc-techedit.org/2007/11/30/keeping-up-with-the-joneses.

Hmm. There is a tutorial here on dangling modifiers, which Zwicky (above) discusses, and which everyone disambiguates dozens of times a day without thinking about it. Helpfully the tutorial says “Dangling modifiers often seem correct, which makes them difficult to recognize as errors.”

There are fun proscriptions, too. In order to avoid sentences like “Indigestion is when you cannot digest food.”, we are enjoined to avoid is when and is where, even though “Edinburgh, not Glasgow, is where I was born.” looks fine to me.


Reference checking
www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~noel/JCIM.html
www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~noel/ACSlookup.html

Following on from the CrossRef lookups I’ve been mentioning in past WebWatches, Noel O’Boyle of the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre, UK has been tackling some different aspects of citation checking.

The first link is to a straightforward format checker that compares the input against American Chemical Society house style, but the second is much more ingenious.

O’Boyle’s contribution is to use sequence alignment algorithms designed for identifying differences between DNA sequences (which are, of course, simply text written in a four-letter alphabet) to compare the citation you’ve entered against the version stored by CrossRef and the one stored by PubMed, and highlight differences.


Learn how - online
http://cpd.conted.ox.ac.uk/personaldev/courses/getting_research_published.asp

Online courses are starting to flood the market, and the publication field is no exception. EASE’s own Liz Wager will be giving an online course on getting your research published this autumn via the University of Oxford’s Department of Continuing Education. 

Many courses focus on the mechanics of writing papers, but this one promises to focus instead on “getting the most from your writing efforts, for example by choosing the best meetings and journals”, and covering “the ethics, conventions and often unwritten rules of publishing in peer-reviewed journals and at conferences.”

Standard fee is £595.


Coping with Word 2007
Contact: lkrauss@stanford.edu

HighWire press have set up an e-mail discussion list about the use of Word 2007 in editorial processes, and Microsoft have two staff who are members of the list.


Top cited in different disciplines
http://info.scopus.com/topcited/

In a canny piece of advertising, Scopus have put up lists of the top 20 cited articles in various fields. The top-cited article since 2006 in Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology is in a crystallography journal and the top-cited Arts and Humanities paper is “Size effects in the deformation of sub-micron Au columns” by Volkert and Lilleodden at the Institute for Materials Research in Karlsruhe, so this tells us that either Scopus’s categories need some tweaking, or that chemists and materials scientists are taking over.

Colin Batchelor (compiler)
batchelorc@rsc.org

Thanks to Paola de Castro and Margaret Cooter.


Something to contribute?
Please send interesting or useful links to Paola de Castro (paola.decastro@iss.it). Sites in European languages other than English are also of interest (but please provide a short review in English); any that relate to areas of science other than biology and medicine will be very welcome.