Physicist Amok

BioCurious points to a Nature Physics editorial that increases my contempt for the vanity journals. All but one paragraph is hypocrisy — injunctions not to label your work as ‘ultrashort quantum nanobiology,’ when Nature accepts no work not so labeled — but that one is revealing:

‘Story’ is the concept that should underlie the structure of the entire paper. The clearer and simpler, the more engrossing it is. On that basis, think about relegating technical details — essential to the science but not the narrative — to a Methods section or to Supplementary Information (the latter published online). Similarly, figures should be designed to enhance the telling of the story and each accompanied by a caption that is as short as possible; to an expert reader, the information conveyed in a figure should be clear without needing to consult the main text.

Do exactly the opposite and you have begun well.

Shun captions. When layout was hard and expensive, pictures and graphs were excised from their surrounding text and typeset on their own pages. This time is behind us. Restore your figures to their natural environment. Dismiss the captions you set to watch over them.

Leave your scaffolding in place. When you have jailed your technical information in ‘Materials and Methods’ or exiled it entirely, what is left but verbiage, citations, and graphs taken on faith? The details of your analysis are shunted elsewhere. Even the measurement technique is banished from its point of use.

Supplemental information has one use: source code, analogous to plasmids and strains in genetics. We would attach our plasmids, too, if only we knew how.

Most damning of all, science isn’t stories. We reason about the world from hypotheses we have justified by stringent test. A mixing angle in quantum field theory is not a story, nor the Gibbs distribution, nor template directed synthesis of DNA. Their value is independent of any story around them. They have value as they provide traction for testing other hypotheses. Wrapping them in a story merely imposes on your reader to unwrap them.