Latest insight gained from listening to advanced undergraduate students about how they see scientific publishing.
original journal article and Ed Yong’s write up about it: same story, but told different ways. Then, I asked them to write out what distinguished the writing style of the two pieces.
One of the things a few of the groups wrote down for the journal article was, “scientific method.” This puzzled me a bit, since they were both reporting the same information. When I asked them to elaborate, they said, “It has an introduction, methods, results, and discussion section.”
They took the format of the paper to be “scientific method.” Not generating hypotheses, designing controlled tests, or analyzing evidence. I’m not sure yet if this is just confusion over terminology or a deeper misunderstanding. It’s not good either way.
Science writing as seen by students