Contextual Analysis of Scientific Publications for Advancing Writing Skills (CASPArS): Self-Learning for Science Writing Using Top Scientists’ Literature

Abstract

Writing is an essential component of scientific activity. As such, it is necessary to develop strategies to provide equitable training opportunities for science writing. In order to provide learners with ways to improve their writing regardless of their language background and/or institutional and departmental environments, this article describes a self-learning strategy, Contextual Analysis of Scientific Publications for Advancing writing Skills (CASPArS), that employs contextual analysis of top scientists’ publications. By using full-text search software to analyze several hundred selected publications, the CASPArS method affords a visual representation of proper usage of words/phrases of interest, facilitating learners to understand writing patterns and rules in leading scientific papers. The utility of the method has been demonstrated with several examples by using 500 non-open-access papers of synthetic organic chemistry and chemical biology fields from various journals such as Nature and Science. In order to increase the accessibility of the method for diverse communities around the world, a free-search software sin3rou and 500 open-access chemistry papers (e.g., ACS Central Science and Chemical Science) by 150 U.S. researchers have been included in the Supporting Information (available online with the full paper). Using this CASPARS strategy, learners/students are able to develop appropriate writing through “professors’ eyes” by taking advantage of established scientific writers’ experience and knowledge of language usage.