Klarinet Archive - Posting 000225.txt from 2005/06

From: Joseph Wakeling <joseph.wakeling@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Bounced babies
Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 18:35:51 -0400

Tony Pay wrote:

> From the supporting online material on the website I posted:
>
> www.tinyurl.com/83thb
>
> "Immediately following the training phase, each infant was given a looking
> time preference test following Trainor & Heinmiller (SI), while mother and
> experimenter listened to masking music."

Yep. The policy of a number of journals (primarily Nature and Science)
is to publish very highly condensed summaries of the research (in this
case, a "brief" article of 1 page; longer reports get about 3-4 pages
and full-blown "research articles" get about 5-8). It's taken as read
that these sort of basic questions will have been dealt with in the
experimental method (if not, the paper wouldn't be accepted by
referees), so it's not put in the main article but usually detailed as
part of the fuller description that is published as supplementary
information on the journal's website. (Back in the days before online
journals you had to write to the journal or to the authors to get a
photocopy!-)

What this actually means is that despite Nature and Science's avowed
requirement that articles must be comprehensible both to specialists and
a wider audience, the compressed nature of the writing means that in
practise it can often be quite difficult to work out what the authors
are actually saying... :-( This happened to be a well-written paper but
some of the ones I've had to take note of professionally (in
neuroscience and economics) were near-impossible to work out.

Fortunately the greater drive towards e-publishing is now meaning that
some very fine journals are emerging (such as the PLoS series) which
allow authors to write at length in a way that "senior" journals in
previous times just didn't allow space for. Better still, many of these
journals are moving to a free-access business model... :-D

-- Joe

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