The Newer Scientist
Digesting science
The scientific paper is set to change, according to GIST, the Government Institute of Science and Technology. Guidelines released yesterday by GIST include the recommendation that every published research or review paper be accompanied by a `digested' version called a `ScienceBite'.
"We got the idea from the Guardian," says Oliver Slope, an author of the report and deputy director of GIST. "Every week they have `The Digested Read' on the back page of G2. It's always quite funny and if you read it you're able to get the gist of a book, if you'll excuse the expression, pretty quickly."
Dr. Slope explained the rationale for this decision at a press conference at GIST's London offices: "One of our remits at GIST is to promote public engagement with science, and one of the best ways to do that is to ensure that more published research makes it into the news media. The ScienceBite will facilitate that."
It seems Dr. Slope's concerns about the dearth of science stories are well-founded. At the moment science journalists have to fight to get science stories into print or on air. Indeed, a science journalist on Metro recently had to hold a gun to the editor's head before he agreed to publish a `hard' science story. The editor of the Daily Mail only discovered that he had a science journalist when he found her hiding in the cloakroom with a bottle of absinthe.
Abigail Cress, a co-author on the report, outlined how the ScienceBite would work:
"Your standard science paper begins with the title followed by an abstract, a short summary of the paper's findings. We have decided that the abstract is, well, a bit abstract. Not everyone gets it, sometimes not even the press officers at the organisation the author works at. The abstract will now become the `ScienceBite'. ScienceBite will be under 200 words in length, will use no words of more than three syllables, and will include an average of 2.3 jokes or catchy puns. Below this, for the really time-pressured science writer or press officer, will be the `MiniBite'. The MiniBite will be written in text-message speak, and take up no more space than a normal text message about 160 characters. This way the scientists will be forced to show their work in language that everyone can understand, and in so doing increase the likelihood of their study reaching a wider audience."
The authors then chose to demonstrate this on recent paper, titled `PER-TIM interactions in living Drosophila cells: an interval timer for the circadian clock'. Under the new proposals, the paper's MiniBite would read: "Bugz uze stopwatches, 2. Clvr pr0-teens help Froot flies 2 tell time of day by tcking 1ce evry 6hrs."
But not everyone is happy about these changes. The Association of Rather Concerned Scientists is protesting that ScienceBites undermines the "Long-established tradition of writing research reports that only a handful of people can understand." A press release from ARCS claimed scientists are being bullied into participating in "half-baked blue-sky publicengagement wheezes formulated by agendadriven policy wonks." In response, Dr Slope said: "That's crap. They should put up or shut up. And anyway, I've got friends in MI5."
