Further Reading — Chapter 35: Writing for Science

Tier 1 (verified landmark works) and Tier 2 (real, widely-attributed standards and bodies) only. No fabricated citations. Where a specific edition or year matters, consult the current version — standards and guidelines in this area are revised regularly.

Tier 1 — Standard works on scientific writing and reporting

American Psychological Association — Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. The source of the statistical-reporting conventions this chapter uses (italicized statistics, lowercase exact p, no leading zero on bounded quantities, degrees of freedom in parentheses, effect sizes and confidence intervals). Even outside psychology, its number-and-statistics rules have become a near-universal house style. Read the results-reporting and statistics sections; keep it open while you write a Results section. Consult the current edition.

Robert A. Day & Barbara Gastel — How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper. The classic practical handbook on the whole publication process — from IMRaD and the abstract through cover letters, dealing with editors, responding to reviewers, and the ethics of authorship. The most directly relevant single book to this chapter; pragmatic and field-aware. Multiple editions; any recent one is excellent.

Joseph M. Williams (with Joseph Bizup) — Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace. Not science-specific, but the deepest treatment of why the active voice clarifies and when the passive earns its place — exactly the judgment §35.1 asks you to make between Methods and Discussion. The chapters on actions-as-verbs and on the "old-to-new" flow underwrite this chapter's voice advice.

Edward R. Tufte — The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. The standard on presenting data honestly and clearly — directly relevant to deciding what goes in a figure versus a table versus the supplement, and to writing captions that survive the move to the SI. Pair with Chapter 9 of this book.

Tier 2 — Standards, taxonomies, and bodies (real; consult current versions)

ICMJE — Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals (the "ICMJE Recommendations"). The most widely cited statement of who qualifies as an author (the four criteria referenced in §35.5), how to handle contributorship, conflicts of interest, and the responsibilities of the corresponding author. Written for medicine but adopted as a reference point across the sciences. Freely available from the ICMJE.

CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy). The fourteen-role controlled vocabulary (Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft, etc.) that an increasing number of journals require for author-contribution statements. Worth reading the role definitions once so your statement uses them correctly.

The major preprint servers — arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, ChemRxiv. Browse the one for your field and read its posting policy and its "what is a preprint" explainer. The best way to understand the preprint norm in §35.4 is to read recent preprints in your area and see how authors label and use them.

Reporting-guideline frameworks (field-dependent) — e.g., CONSORT (clinical trials), PRISMA (systematic reviews), ARRIVE (animal research). If your field has a reporting checklist, it is effectively a required convention: many journals mandate it at submission. Find yours via the EQUATOR Network (a real registry of reporting guidelines) and follow it from the first draft, not at the end.

How to use this list

You will get more from three recent papers in your exact target journal than from any book here — that's the chapter's core method, and it's not a shortcut, it's the technique. Use these sources to learn the principles (how to report a statistic, what authorship means, what a preprint is); use the journal's own pages and recent papers to learn the local conventions (this venue's voice, length limits, statistical house style, OA model). Principles port across fields; conventions don't.

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