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Alex Palazzo of The Daily Transcript rants on the things he hates about journals (though I wish he added that they aren’t all open access!). I agree with most of his complaints, and I’ll add a couple of things.
Science and Nature articles (and those that emulate them, like the Biophysical Journal’s Biophysical Letters section, or Rapid Communciations in the Physical Review) are definitely frustrating to read, partly because of the ultra-short word count, but also because scientists just can’t write very well. Raise your hand if you’ve had any formal training in how to write a good science report. I know I haven’t.
Supplementary information sections are rarely read, with important data often “thrown down the drain” as Alex mentions, but I think there’s a bigger problem: they are dreadfully written, and mustn’t be edited to the same standards required for regular articles. I think this does everyone an injustice as the real meat of the papers are often found in the supplemental section, but they’re impossible to read. Not only that, most journals have their published articles available as PDFs, while supplemental information is often only available as Microsoft Word documents. Why everything isn’t offered in PDF format I will never know, as I (and lots of other physicists) never use Word for any reason, and I don’t even have it installed on my computer anymore!
I’ll second that experimental method references are a wild goose chase: in my own field of optical tweezers, some papers reference methods and instruments that are very different from the instrument used in their current papers, so it amounts to an effectively useless reference if I wanted to reproduce measurements using as identical a setup as possible.
Finally, though I don’t necessarily agree that journal covers are getting too funky, I would like it if they offered nice, high resolution PDFs of covers without the text on them—they would often make cool desktop backgrounds!
Biocurious is written by Andre Brown and Philip Johnson, since 2005. Content of the weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
