Ok, not that kind of Introduction. I’ve mentioned before that I find the Introduction the hardest part of a scientific paper to write. I know I’m not alone. It’s easy to wander, or to stuff in everything you know that’s even remotely relevant, or (especially if you’re me) to simply get paralyzed and write nothing...

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Every few months I inflict upon you my weird fascination with the etymology of Latin names. It’s been almost 5 months since I rhapsodized about Loncovilius carlsbergi, so it’s time. Today: a quartet of newly described spiders whose names please me for reasons I can’t quite enunciate. Meet Utivarachna angsoduo, U. balonku, U. rimba, and...

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Over the last few weeks, there’s been a small flood of cases where a published paper turns out to have clear fingerprints of its authors’ use of ChatGPT (or other so-called “artificial intelligence” tools). By “fingerprints” I don’t mean the kind of odd-but-acceptable phrasing ChatGPT sometimes comes up with. I mean laugh-out-loud ridiculous things like...

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OK, it isn’t really, but I enjoyed seeing Dynamic Ecology say so. A couple of weeks ago I argued here that it’s effective, and thus desirable, to end the Introduction of a scientific paper with a brief statement of your main result. But I also admitted that this isn’t universally held opinion; in fact, I’ve...

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Like a lot of people, I’ve been watching with great curiosity the rapid development and deployment of “artificial intelligence” tools like ChatGPT. (I’ve been writing about them a fair bit too, most recently for a chapter in my new book on teaching scientific writing.) To my mind, what’s even more fascinating than the capability of...

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Last week, I suggested that readers are well served if the Introduction of a scientific paper includes a short statement of the main result. But I also acknowledged that this may be more of a preference than a bulletproof argument. And sure enough, several readers chimed in to say that I’m wrong. (Well, that’s the...

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I just gave a little workshop in a university course on creative writing – something that high-school me would have thought about as unlikely as my winning the World Series MVP trophy.* But why me? I was there, somewhat surprisingly, to talk about “creative nonfiction”. Among readers of Scientist Sees Squirrel, there are surely many...

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It will not surprise you that, over the course of a 30-year career in science, I’ve read a lot of scientific papers. Over the same span I’ve also read a lot of mystery novels.* As a result of this exhaustive research, I can tell you this: they are not the same. I know, you aren’t...

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Last week, Daniel Bingham announced that peer-review.io, the system he built for crowdsourcing peer review of academic manuscripts, will be shutting down (it seems to be already offline). It was an interesting experiment, and I’m disappointed, but I am also completely, utterly, 157% unsurprised. Here’s why. Peer review is a form of academic service. For...

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Sometimes the same interesting tidbit ends up in front of you twice in quick succession. The first time, it clears its throat politely and hopes you might notice it; but the second time, it sounds a klaxon and makes itself impossible to miss. It happened to me this week with the word “scholar”, and it...

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