Notes from the school

Hi people,

I digitalized my notes (taken during the school) and thought that it may be a good idea to share it with you. I hope they will be useful, even if they are far of being complete. When writing down during the school, I was only considering the things that I do not know (or I knew but still find interesting). If somebody has more complete set of notes, she/he is welcome to edit the attached file. I would be also glad to have the ppt presentations (if our professors do not mind..).

Cheers
Mina

P.S. Sorry, I did not see a way to attach my ascii file, so I just copied and pasted..

; These are very brief and largely incomplete notes from SWYA/2009.
; This school was held in Blankenberge, Belgium http://www.swya.org/
;
; Every lecture is separated by '----------', and it is followed
; by the name of the lecturer and the title in quotation marks.
;
; c The author do not pretend that the notes are complete or unbiased.
; She wrote down what she thought to be useful/interesting
; for herself. It is possible that she miss-understood or
; miss-spelled something.
;
; Mina Koleva 2009/05/29
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Chris Sterken 'Introduction to communication in science'

Science is data, theory, narrative

Now there are 6800 language, in 100 years only 800!

Pieter - a painter
George Bernard Show - a play writer
Pinyin - chinese romanization

1895 MNRAS/ApJ formed
1948 first Palomar telescope
1958 first light of 1.98m in OHP
1964 opening of ESO
1969 A&A founded

80% of the submitted paper are published

origin of the referees
- UK+USA 55 %
- FR 11 %
- Spain 4 %
- Germany 12 %
- Russia 1 %

time for processing (accepting)
25 % in 60 days
50 % 37 days (letters)
25 % 30 days (letters)

60 % of the articles are send for english editing

AAS - ApJ, AJ -paid by the community
EDP - A&A -paid by the community
MNRAS - Wiley - private

Subscription ApJ - 2666 E; MNRAS - 4600 E

Impact factor = number of articles in 2008 / number of citation in 2006/7
A&A - 4; MNRAS - 5; ApJ > 6, AJ > 5

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Uta Grothropf 'Astronomical libraries'

DOI - digital object identifier (if the web page moved you can still track)

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Joli Adams 'Language editing in practice'

? How to check what is the main meaning of the word ?

Style guides:

- sti.nasa.gov/publish/sp7084.pdf
- Strunk & White 'The elements of style' @ Bartleby.com
- Madison Wisconsin Writing Lab of Scientific reports
- Washington State University site by Paul Briams

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Laurent Cambresy 'CDS'

to identify an object in CDS \object{}

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Chris Sterken 'The structure of a research paper'

1. Research report in a ref journal
- letters to the editor
- regular paper
- research notes
- errata & comments
2. Information builitines and telegraphs
3. PhD thesis book
4. Review paper
5. Data paper

When reading, the first impression comes from:
1. Abstract
2. Caption of the figure
3. titles of the tables
4. Conclusion

facts --> interpretation
IMRAD (Intro, Method, Results And Discussion)

When writing:
1. Data description
1.1 Methods, Observations, Computations
- describe as such to allow reproduction
- do this in a consistent way (observation log in table)
- do not repeat the same
1.2 Results
- avoid tabular and figure redundancy
- point out how the data look, but without interpretation
- errors
2. Discussion
- analyse the result
- compare with previous results
- suggestion to improve your results
3. Conclusion
(References in the mean time)
4. Introduction
- clear
- why
- put you study in a broad context
- brief literature review
- finish after the discussions
5. Abstract = the hook
- max information with minimum words
- why - objective of the research
- how - how you did the research
- what - what are the results
6. Title (must be attractive, avoid excessive words, like 'a study of'; avoid need of experts knowledge, final when finish, no grammatical errors, no typos,
no questions, you need a verb in it)

Le Maitre - first to observe the Hubble constant
abbreviation - use only if you are going to use it more than 4 times
footnotes - keep to a minimum

If you have comments on your work - never feel offended

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Uta Grothkopf 'Introduction to bibliometrics and tools for organizing references'

JabRef + user friendly
Zotero - not easy to export to bibtex
Mandeley

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Martine Usdin Hands-on writing session II (parallel session)

* do not use -ing (good for spoken language)
* better to use active not a passive form
* when if a phrase you have 'that', remove everything before, for example
'We like to mention that, ...'
* no comma in front of 'also'
* data are always in plural
* allows us/ allows one
* big / get / put --> large / obtain, have, found, defind / place
* no huge, no enormous
* do not use together from and between
* do not use suppose to be
* which (the phrase does between commas) or that

thanks a lot. it is a nice idea. ana