The Looming Problem of Word Limits and Scientific Publication

December 7, 2009 · Posted in HUGO President Blogs

…or Length Matters

by HUGO President Prof. Edison T Liu

I have been confronted both as an author and a reviewer with the difficulty of explaining a complex story within a 1500 or even a 5000 word limit for a manuscript. The basis of the word limits in many journals have been historical , and often was because of print costs. But as science advances, this publication boundary has not moved with the times. What exactly have been the trends in the biological sciences?

Genomics has been the vanguard of these trends. The datasets are massive, the analyses are complex, and the validation is also extensive. When a high throughput screen for, let’s say, siRNA knock downs, or for synthetic lethality in a genome-wide scale is presented, the appropriate description for just the initial set up and analysis may run into the maximum 5000 words. The biological interrogations and functional validations can rationally require many more words to explain.

In order to compress the presentation, authors have rendered figures with many subpanels and place critical data in supplementary sections that can be many times the size of the original manuscript. In one systems biology paper (Pujana MA, et al. Nat Genet. 39(11):1338-49, 2007), one figure (figure 4) had 4 parts (a-d) but presented 9 panels of high analytical complexity. Our paper recently published in Nature (Fullwood MJ, et al. Nature. 462(7269):58-64, 2009), had a supplement with ~10,000 words for a manuscript that contained less than 5,000 words. The HUGO Pan-Asian SNP Consortium will publish in Science (December 2009) a scientific story in 4000 words which will require a supplementary section of 14,000 words.

It can be said that the supplemental section should be the place to explain the details not necessary for the core story. However, this is becoming less true, especially in genomics, where the massive nature of the data and the analysis requires compartmented analysis each of which are critical to the main story. Operationally, this is leading to a troubling trend. The supplemental data is given marginal analysis by both readers and reviewers. In many ways, this is like presenting each classical novel as a CliffsNotes summary with a supplement that contains the original chapters. One possible outcome is that a distracted public and even expert review panels will miss serious problems in the analysis that is “tucked” away in the supplemental section (as implied in Coombes KR, Wang J & Baggerly KA, Nature Medicine 13, 1276 – 1277, 2007).

Indeed, our schedules are busy and our time is precious, but perhaps we need a publication format that will preserve the needed scholarship and yet respect the limited attention span of busy scientists. For example, why not have an extended abstract of ~400-500 words that tells the core story (even include a figure or two), but allow for the detailed work to be presented in its entirety as a coherent narrative. Given the online nature of journals, this surely cannot be more expensive than the current main-text-with-online-supplement format.

Regardless of whether you are pro or con to this opinion piece, I would encourage the readers to comment and to engage their communities in such a discussion about change in scientific publishing.

Comments

One Response to “The Looming Problem of Word Limits and Scientific Publication”

Pallavi Shukla on February 12th, 2010 2:45 am

I am very much agreed to the write up Prof. Edison T Liu on “The Looming Problem of Word Limits and Scientific Publication”. The publication pattern should change in such a way that the core work can be presented in the main paper and supplementary should be short and should be used to present the additional details only.

I could not agree more with the rationale presented by Prof. Liu, but I tend to differ on the conclusion drawn. I think if it had been a debate between brevity and clarity, it would have been easier for me to agree with him.
Of course, clarity and comprehension cannot be compromised at the expense of brevity, but what about ambiguity and verbosity.

I feel a research article should be clear and concise and the technical details, statistics, derivations and demographics should be described in the supplement. Referring to supplements or references may or may not distract a reader but bombarding the reader with the information that is not very relevant will certainly do. I believe reporting in a clear and concise way is as important as is generating quality data. In the absence of word limit, it is easier for a research to be redundant and verbose – two factors that can only confuse the reader.

I however believe that the word limit should be case specific and a proper care should be given in making sure that the world limit should not curtail the relevant information. It is a difficult, but not an impossible task. It demands a balancing act and I am sure with some efforts, editorial board of Journals and the experts on the subject can arrive at a figure that will do a justice to both the writer and the reader, making sharing of scientific information faster, easier and efficient.