Writing, Reading, and Reviewing Scientific Articles

This coming week in the bio colloquium we're reading an article from the primary literature. To provide general background on the elements of a scientific paper we also handed out "guidelines for writing a scientific paper". To help you think about it from the other end (reviewer vs. writer) you may want to see what guidelines the scientific journals provide their reviewers, that is, what helps us decide whether a paper is "publishable" by a given journal. This is useful in writing (and reading) a paper to see what the "critics" are looking for.

Here is the link for reviewers for the journal, Ecology:
http://esapubs.org/esapubs/reviewers.htm

Also informative is the "Reviewers Information Pack" (http://www.nxtbook.com/nxteu/elsevier/reviewersinfopack/) for everything you might want to know about the review process for journal articles. This is provided by Elsevier, which publishes Developmental Biology, and hundreds of other journals (http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journal_browse.cws_home)

Here's their reviewers' home page:
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/reviewershome.reviewers