A young scientist in his early thirties, with more than 40 publications and a permanent position at a European university, has gotten the following comment in the judgment of his research proposal: the candidate writes articles with many different coauthors. And, that is listed in the weak points of the proposal.

I assume a scientific proposal is to be judged based on its scientific value, and not based on the personality of its author. The number of coauthors relates very much to the history of a scientist’s activities and has nothing to do with his scientific qualifications.

Presenting science in front of an audience invariably implies presentation of slides, either as support for the spoken text, or as the main ingredient of the presentation. I always wonder why these slides are so ill-designed: awful contrast, extremely busy, inconsistent lay-out through the slide show, wildly varying font sizes etc. The metaphors that come to mind are that of an elementary school playground or (comparison from a colleague of mine) that of an indoor swimming pool full of children. (picture © Kilian-Nakamura.com 2007).But we scientists are amateurs with respect to design of graphics. So let us see how the professionals do this.

Young people, in tenure track positions, feel they to have to collect as many authorships as possible. Questions like “Will I be a coauthor?” and demands as “I have to be a coauthor” are part of daily conversations in science institutes.

But not only junior scientists are eager to boost their cv’s with authored papers. Seniors use their social status to fight themselves into the list of authors.

In a number of groups the list of authors is not discussed but imposed upon. The boss decides. Him being the last author is an axiom. The issue of free riders imposed by the boss, gives rise to a lot of frustration on the side of the first author.

There are a couple of different opinions about the length of sentences in a scientific article. A scientific argument should be precise. It usually contains many technical terms that must be well-defined, thus should be described verbally. Descriptive phrases or sentences need to be linked somehow to the central message of the paragraph, which can be an idea, a claim, a result or a fact.

I have encountered two different guidelines for constructing paragraphs. The “survival guide for scientists” insists on short sentences. On the contrary, “academic writing for graduate students” insists on the “Flow: moving from one statement in a text to the next” and provides us with a full table of linking words and phrases that can be used for introducing clauses and phrases; it means making sentences longer.

Not only the scientific glossy magazines but also the professional journals are invaded by the colorful graphs that either look like an artificially colored moon landscape, or like a collection of candy sticks or like a flying carpet. I do not like them and in particular the candy sticks I find ugly.

In physics and mathematics progress is made by generalizing and abstracting. The ultimate result is the capturing of one’s finding in a mathematical formula or an - admittedly dull - scientific X-Y graph. As a result physics papers were are full of these terrifying items. I say were, as the X-Y plot is on its way out.

Is it true that articles in high-impact journals involve, in average, more coauthors?

A while ago, I was involved in writing a review article, which finally included around 270 references. Being not very experienced in using BibTeX, I had to manually enter many references in my TeX-file. There I noticed that Nature and Science entries took more time to handle because they usually come with more than 4 coauthors.

When people reply to an email message I sent them, they often append my (full) email message in the body of their email. When I look at the text of my echoed email I get frustrated. I see that my text has acquired a large number of awkward line breaks, at positions where I certainly did not put them. With these new breaks the text is much more difficult to read.
Can we prevent this mutilation of our email text?

In the internet protocol descriptions (RFC’s) servers and clients are allowed to add line breaks (”\CR\LF”) wherever they like. This convention has has been prescribed to ensure that text messages will survive any network, irrespective of platform, operating system.

He calculates the Fourier-transform of a rational function in his mind. He inverts a 9 by 9 complex valued matrix on the back of an envelope in ten minutes. At the age of 30, He publishes one chapter of a book and 10 articles every year, in 3 of these articles he is a single author. He works 11 hours a day in his room and he is always busy thinking or calculating. He knows the answer to any physical and mathematical question you ask. He must be a genius.

Scientist go to conferences held at exotic places. They go to winter schools where they teach in the morning and ski in the afternoon. Researchers are getting paid for following their passion and pursuing their hobby.

If they are group leader they have the freedom to choose their subjects of study. Scholars are trusted by society (may be not in the US, but surely so in Germany) and admired for their intelligence by their relatives. They go to work ill-dressed and are proud of it. And they do not sit behind their desk all day (unless you are a theoretician). This sounds like an ideal job.

As a junior researcher with a little experience in writing articles, I have asked a few senior scientists about the part that they think is the best to start writing a manuscript from. Some experimentalists propose to start with the graphs and their captions. For a theory article, some scientists like to start with the the main body of their calculations and then insert the words in between the formulas.