怎样准备一篇适合Nature系列杂志的文章标题与摘要.doc

How to prepare titles and abstracts worthy of a Nature paper.
Contributor Anthea Lacchia
Understanding what editors in top-tier journals such as Nature are looking for in a title and abstract is not always easy, especially for early-stage career researchers. Speaking to a packed room, Kyle Vogan, Senior Editor at Nature Genetics, shared his insights into what makes a perfect title and abstract as part of a Nature Masterclass held at the Boston NatureJobs Career Expo 2015.
Although title and abstract alone are not enough to lead to a paper’s rejection or acceptance, they do help journal editors form an opinion. With the volume of scientific literature growing rapidly, carefully crafted titles and abstracts can help a paper get noticed amid the noise. To this end, they should be short, self-contained and database-friendly, said Vogan, who noted that the title and abstract will be read by far more people than the rest of the paper. Therefore it is important to make sure these signposts contain information on study design, sample size, experimental evidence and main conclusions. “Focusing just on the conclusions may not give the reader enough confidence to know whether to believe that the data actually support the claims,” Vogan said.
Titles: be simple and specific
The title should encapsulate the novelty of your paper and be understandable on first reading. Vogan recommended that titles follow the acronym DEF: they should be declarative, which means they should make a statement about something (e.g. with a subject, action verb and object);
应该用陈述式，具有主谓宾结构，陈述一个事实、一个结论。
engaging, (which usually translates into not being overly technical; and
要能吸引眼球，并且让外行人也能一下子读明白你的意思，不要用过于专业化的词。
focused (so, short).
精悍，简练，点睛

Vogan offered a number of tips for drafting a title, including:
· Use active rather than passive verbs.
· 用主动语态，不要用被动语态。

· Avoid words that don’t add to the story such as: “on this”, “study”, and “investigation”.
· 避免使用对整个故事没有增加信息量的无意义的词。

· Be specific in delivering your message: the title of a Nature Medicine article published in 2012 was changed from “The effect of insulin on liver cells in the absence of 2 key signalling components” to “Insulin regulates liver metabolism in vivo in the absence of hepatic Akt and Foxo1” ($). Not every reader may know what Akt and Foxo1 are, but the title is declarative and specific.
· 清楚、有效地传递信息。

· “But don’t be too specific” said Vogan. When possible, avoid acronyms and other jargon, which renders the title opaque to readers not already conversant in the field. However, Vogan noted that this should not be viewed as an absolute prohibition and that sometimes it is not possible to adequately convey the essence of the research without acronyms.
· 不要过于专业化，尽量让不同专业的人都能看懂。尽量避免缩写、术语。

· Be careful of being overly assertive in titles (e.g. by claiming a cause-and-effect relationship when the data only show a correlation).
· 标题中的结论不要过于武断、绝对。

· Avoid question marks: titles should present outcomes, without teasing the reader. Furthermore, articles with interrogative titles tend to be rejected.
· 题目中绝对不要用问题的形式，这很有可能被拒稿！

· Focus on what is novel in the work.
· 突出新意，新意很重要！

· Avoid complex, compound nouns. For example, the term “excess water-weight remover” would probably be removed from a title during the editorial process at a Nature journal, according Vogan.
· 不要用复杂的符合名词。

· Genus and species names can be included, but should be accompanied by the common name of the organism.
· 种属的专业名词后面一定要带上对应的普通常用名词。

· Avoid puns, since they are not usually very helpful, lead to fewer citations, and tend to make papers invisible to web searches. Besides, Vogan added, these attempts at humour tend to be funnier to the authors than to anyone else. As an example, he pointed to a paper published in the journal Bioinformatics with the title “Multiple alignment by aligning alignments“. “I don’t know what that actually means, except that they are trying to be cute,” Vogan said.
· 不要用任何隐晦的修辞手法，就用简单、直接、清楚、体现新意的陈述句就行了。
Although these are good rules to keep in mind, Vogan advised not obsessing too much over them. “Not every good title will strike every box,” he said. Usually it’s a trade off between the main components of DEF. Some titles may be focused and engaging, but not very declarative; an example of this was drawn from a paper published in Nature Genetics this year titled “A Big Bang model of human colorectal tumor growth” ($).
Abstracts: Get to the point
Vogan presented what he called the “Nature formula” for writing abstracts. They should start from a few general statements to give context, then they should describe the problem and main results, and they should end with a brief summary about what the results add to previous research. The space devoted to the abstract depends on the journal guidelines, but, once adjusted to the specified length, this approach should increase the chances of – though by no means guarantee – a paper’s acceptance, Vogan said.
Nature摘要公式：
几句话介绍背景，给出本研究的语境。→引导出研究问题和获得的主要结论。→最后给个小结，突出该研究在前人成果上的进步之处。
Vogan offered some dos and don’ts for writing better abstracts:
· Do include keywords in order to make it more searchable.
· 摘要里要包含关键词，这样可以提高被搜索到的概率。

· Don’t try to include everything. Keep it focused.
· 不要面面俱到。

· Don’t include too much detail about methods.
· 方法部分不用过于详细。

· Don’t use obscure abbreviations, acronyms and references to literature or to figures.
· 不要使用难以理解的简写、属于、参考文献或者参考图标。
As the audience left the room they appeared excited to put what they had learned into practice: “I learned a lot,” said Ardeshir Kianercy, a mechanical engineer at Johns Hopkins. “I’m going to change my title around and will probably submit to Nature.”