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Scientific Style and Format: The CBE Manual for Authors, Editors, and Publishers
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6th edition. Style Manual Committee, Council of Biology Editors. 825 pages. New York: Cambridge Univ Pr; 1994. $34.95. ISBN 0-521-47154-0. Order phone 800-221-4512.
Publication ensures that the results of any research effort are permanently recorded. Studies that are not published do not contribute to scientific progress and therefore benefit almost no one. Although the most important aspect of any scientific manuscript is the quality of the ideas and the data that are being presented, how they are presented determines not only whether they are understood but even whether anyone reads about them. The "how" encompasses both writing style and what the authors of this book refer to as "publication style."
This new edition of the CBE Manual concerns primarily the latter. It differs from the last edition in two ways. That edition contained much material on how to write and submit papers, and specific material on publication style—nomenclature, abbreviations, symbols, and units—was limited to the biological and medical sciences. Much of the former material is gone, and all of the sciences are now covered. The committee of authors, chaired by Edward J. Huth, Editor Emeritus of Annals, clearly made the decision to be more inclusive early in the process of revision, because the new material on the physical sciences is well integrated into the book. This new material and that specific to particular biological and medical sciences—for example, information on bacteria, cells, and drugs—constitute nearly 40% of the book. The rest deals mostly with general matters of style, such as word choice, grammar and punctuation, journal and book formats, and referencing. In considering all of these topics, I think that the authors accomplished their main goals—to make sound recommendations for uniformity and simplification of style—very well indeed.
There is no doubt that editors and publishers will find this book valuable, but will it be useful to authors and potential authors, particularly those who will be submitting manuscripts to Annals? The answer is surely yes, for several reasons. First, the book contains useful information about writing, such as how to write titles and abstracts and how to prepare tables and graphs. Second, matters of publication style are not trivial to editors and should not be to authors. They are vital components of a manuscript and contribute greatly to whether it is read and understood. Journal editors are most interested in the substance of a manuscript, not its style, because the latter can be fixed during the process of evaluation, revision, and publishing. True, but bad style can make good research unrecognizable. The better the style, the more evident the quality of the work, and making editors work overtime to attend to these matters is not the way to speed publication of one's manuscripts. Authors who do not consult this book or others like it—and I know of none more authoritative—do so at their peril.
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