Scientific Research Articles: Twenty-Two Language Errors to Avoid

Introduction

English is the de facto language of scientific communication (Swales, 1997; Simionescu and Simion, 2004). This means that scientists, regardless of origin and mother tongue, who aspire to publish world-class research need to read and write scientific research articles in English (Ventola, 1994; Bitetti and Ferreras, 2017). Publishing in top-tier English language scientific journals is a prerequisite for career advancement in many countries, or as Ventola (1992) puts it, “publish in English or perish” (p.191). Graduation from doctoral programs, gaining a university post, drawing down research funding and securing tenure may all be contingent on having been published in journals of a pre-determined rank or impact factor (Schein, Farndon and Fingerhut, 2000; Peat, Elliott, Baur and Keena, 2002).

Despite the focus on novelty and substance of research contributions, research articles that are permeated with lexical, grammatical or genre-related errors are more likely to be rejected. Intrusive errors may cause reviewers to misunderstand the intended meaning, severely lowering the chance for acceptance of a manuscript submitted for publication. One non-intrusive language error is unlikely to result in rejection, but multiple non-intrusive errors may create a negative impression possibly leading the academic gatekeepers to fall victim to the horns-and-halo effect, and assume that the research itself may also contain errors (Maiorana and Mayer, 2018). In short, writing error-free prose reduces the possibility of rejection.

This chapter focuses on the language difficulties that scientists need to overcome to write scientific research articles that conform to the generic expectations of the community of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991). By pinpointing the potential points of failure, i.e. the language errors, scientists can take proactive measures to avoid making similar errors, and adopt a systematic approach to identify these types of errors in their own writing.

Twenty-two specific types of language errors are identified, explained and suggestions for addressing them are given. As there are no native speakers of scientific communication, these errors apply to both native and non-native English speakers. Although this chapter limits its claims to English and scientific writing, it is likely that similar types of errors are present in formal scientific texts written in other languages, and in other formal writing genres, such as academic and research writing.

This chapter starts by reviewing the literature on language errors with particular reference to scientific writing and scientific research articles. However, among the various classification systems that are discussed, no system focusses on the language errors that potentially lead to rejection by reviewers. The following section describes the attempt to address this lacuna in the research by conducting a template analysis of the pedagogic literature. The next section describes the annotation and analysis of a corpus of draft research articles collected at a research institute in Japan. Starting with the five categories identified by the template analysis, the corpus investigation revealed a total of 22 types of errors. The following sections describe, explain and suggest ways to address these errors. The chapter concludes by summarizing the key concepts and identifying future research directions.

The primary objectives of this chapter are to:

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  show the importance of error-free writing to scientists and researchers

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  demonstrate how genre, practitioner expectations and scientific writing are intertwined

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  detail a study to investigate the type of errors in scientific writing

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  describe, explain and exemplify the type of errors discovered

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  provide a taxonomy of language-related errors

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  exemplify and explain each type of error

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  suggest ways to avoid or ameliorate these errors