THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF

SCIENTIFIC COMMUNICATION

Given current science-related crises facing the world such as climate change, the targeting and
manipulation of DNA, GMO foods, and vaccine denial, the way in which we communicate science
matters is vital for current and future generations of scientists and publics.
The Routledge Handbook of Scientific Communication scrutinizes what we value, prioritize, and grapple
with in science as highlighted by the rhetorical choices of scientists, students, educators, science
gatekeepers, and lay commentators. Drawing on contributions from leading thinkers in the field, this
volume explores some of the most pressing questions in this growing field of study, including:

• How do issues such as ethics, gender, race, shifts in the publishing landscape, and English as the
lingua franca of science influence scientific communication practices?
• How have scientific genres evolved and adapted to current research and societal needs?
• How have scientific visuals developed in response to technological advances and communication
needs?
• How is scientific communication taught to a variety of audiences?

Offering a critical look at the complex relationships that characterize current scientific communication
practices in academia, industry, government, and elsewhere, this Handbook will be essential reading for
students, scholars, and professionals involved in the study, practice, and teaching of scientific, medical,
and technical communication.

Cristina Hanganu-Bresch is Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of the
Sciences, USA. She has authored a variety of books and articles in the area of the rhetoric of medicine,
in particular psychiatry, and in scientific communication. Among her books is Effective Scientific
Communication: The Other Half of Science, with Kelleen Flaherty (2020).

Michael J. Zerbe is Professor of Rhetoric and Writing Studies at York College of Pennsylvania, USA.
He is the author of Composition and the Rhetoric of Science: Engaging the Dominant Discourse, and his work
has also appeared in the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Configurations, and POROI.

Gabriel Cutrufello is Associate Professor of Composition and Rhetoric in the Department of

Communication and Writing at York College of Pennsylvania, USA. His research interests include the
rhetoric of science and the history of technical writing. His work has been published in Rhetoric Review
and Written Communication.

Stefania M. Maci is Professor of English Language and Translation at the University of Bergamo,
Italy. Her research is centered around ESP with a corpus linguistics approach, focusing, in particular,
on medical and popularized discourse across genres (research articles, research letters, posters) from an
intercultural perspective.
 THE ROUTLEDGE
HANDBOOK OF SCIENTIFIC
COMMUNICATION

Edited by Cristina Hanganu-Bresch, Michael J. Zerbe,

Gabriel Cutrufello, and Stefania M. Maci
 Cover image © Getty Images
First published 2022
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Cristina Hanganu-Bresch, Michael
J. Zerbe, Gabriel Cutrufello, and Stefania M. Maci; individual chapters, the
contributors
The right of Cristina Hanganu-Bresch, Michael J. Zerbe, Gabriel
Cutrufello, and Stefania M. Maci to be identified as the authors of the
editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hanganu-Bresch, Christina, editor.
Title: The Routledge handbook of scientific communication / edited
by Christina Hanganu-Bresch, Michael J. Zerbe, Gabriel Cutrufello,
and Stefania M. Maci.
Description: 1 Edition. | New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. |
Series: Routledge international handbooks | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Subjects: LCSH: Communication in science—Handbooks, manuals, etc. |
Science—Language—Handbooks, manuals, etc. | Technical writing—
Handbooks, manuals, etc.
Classification: LCC Q223 .R668 2022 (print) | LCC Q223 (ebook) |
DDC 808.06/65—dc23/eng/20210927
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021037531
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021037532
ISBN: 978-0-367-48979-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-19053-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-04378-2 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003043782
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
 CONTENTS

List of figures ix
List of tables xii
List of contributors xiii
Acknowledgement xix

Introduction 1
Michael J. Zerbe, Gabriel Cutrufello, Cristina Hanganu-Bresch
and Stefania M. Maci

PART 1
Scientific research, writing, and publishing 13

1 The scholarly publishing landscape 15

Ken Hyland

2 The evolution of author functions in scientific communication 26

Sarah Tinker Perrault

3 The new norm: open access publishing and scientific research 36

Michelle Sidler

4 Ethical issues in scientific publication: rapidly evolving practices

in the global scientific community 47
Mya Poe

5 My testimony: Black Feminist Thought in scientific communication 58

Natasha N. Jones

v
 Contents

6 Gender and scientific communication 69

Lillian Campbell

7 Peer review in scientific publishing 80

Brad Mehlenbacher and Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher

8 Editorial peer review at basic and applied sciences journals

in the semiperiphery context of Taiwan 90
Cheryl L. Sheridan

9 Why I should cite you? The evolving role of documentation

and citation in scholarly communication 102
Tomás Koch Ewertz

10 Measuring impact 112

Glenn Hampson

11 Collaborative models for scientific writing 124

Lisa DeTora and Sabrina Sobel

12 Expanding expertise in communicating science through public

and citizen science 135
Jennifer C. Mallette

13 Scientific communication in English as a second language 145

Maurizio Gotti

PART 2
Scientific communication genres 157

14 The scientific article: variation and change in knowledge

communication practices 159
Marina Bondi

15 Reviewing the scientific review article 170

Judy Noguchi

16 Grant proposals in the academic sphere: a historical review 180

Begoña Bellés-Fortuño

17 Searching for the “magic elixir”: uncertainty in developing specific

aims and broader impacts for NIH and NSF grants 189
Colleen A. Reilly

vi
 Contents

18 Examining tensions between technical communication principles

and scientific practice: does jargon belong on scientific posters? 200
Kalie Leonard

19 The medical case report as genre and social practice 213

Chad Wickman

20 Scientific letters and commentaries in their historical and social contexts 224
Maureen A. Mathison

21 Scientist citizens: nontraditional and alternative approaches to

scientific communication 235
Justin Mando

PART 3
Scientific visuals and multimedia 245

22 Speaking to the eyes: a historical overview of data visualization

in the sciences 247
Danielle DeVasto

23 Statistics and data visualization 271

Vaclav Brezina and Raffaella Bottini

24 Graphical abstracts: visually circulating scientific arguments 290

Jonathan Buehl

25 Doing science digitally: the role of multimodal interactive

representations in scientific rhetoric 307
Lauren E. Cagle

26 Science communication, visual rhetoric, and eBird: the role of

participatory science communication in fostering empathy for species 324
Amy D. Propen

PART 4
Scientific communication pedagogy 335

27 Emerging practices in science communication pedagogy 337

Kate Maddalena

28 Pedagogies for supporting global scientists’ research writing 348

James N. Corcoran and Karen Englander

vii
 Contents

29 Threshold concepts in scientific writing literacy: what citizens

and scientists need to know about scientific writing 359
Gwendolynne Reid

30 Language as a realization of scientific reasoning in scientific texts

and its importance for promoting secondary school students’
disciplinary literacy 370
Moriah Ariely and Anat Yarden

31 Professional development in science communication for practicing

scientists: the role of science communication training programs in
shaping participating scientists’ skills 381
Yael Barel-Ben David and Ayelet Baram-Tsabari

32 Grand challenges: a case study in the complications of and best

practices for writing across the curriculum in scientific and
technical communication classrooms 396
Jenna Morton-Aiken

33 Disciplinary expertise, writing centers, and STEM writers 408

Susanne Hall

Index 418

viii
 FIGURES

10.1 The many stages of impact evaluation 119

10.2 Adaptation of the SAGE model of scientific impact 120
18.1 Respondent roles in science 203
18.2 Primary poster audience 204
18.3 Main purpose of a scientific poster presentation 205
18.4 Respondent definitions of jargon 205
18.5 How often respondents use jargon on their own posters 206
18.6 How often respondents notice jargon on others’ posters 207
18.7 How respondents make decisions about using (or not using) jargon
on a poster 208
18.8 Elements of “conventional” and “well designed and engaging” posters 209
22.1 Sample visualizations: infographic about obesity (left), data visualization
of annual mean temperatures (top right), scientific visualization of a large
simulation of a Rayleigh-Taylor instability problem (bottom right) 249
22.2 Re-creation of Anaximander’s world map, sixth century 250
22.3 Yu ji tu (“Map of the Tracks of Yu”), twelfth century 251
22.4 Arbor scientiae (“Tree of Science”), Ramon Llull, 1515 252
22.5 Visualization of planetary cycles, tenth century 253
22.6 Diagrams of the velocity of an accelerating object against time,
Nicole Oresme, fourteenth century 254
22.7 “History of Weather,” Robert Plot, 1685 255
22.8 Chart of the trade winds and monsoons, Edmond Halley, 1687 256
22.9 Graph of determinations of distance from Toledo to Rome, Michael van
Langren, 1644 257
22.10 Zebra pattern of magnetic stripes on the seafloor, Ronald Mason and
Arthur Raff, 1961 258
22.11 Delineation of the strata of England and Wales with part of Scotland,
William Smith, 1815 259
22.12 Weather chart, Francis Galton, 1875 260
22.13 “Chart Representing the Extent, Population, and Revenue of the
Principle Nations in Europe in 1804,” William Playfair, 1805 262

ix
 Figures

22.14 “Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in the Army of the East,” Florence
Nightingale, 1858 263
22.15 One of the original scatterplots for the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram,
HN Russell, 1914 264
22.16 Screenshot from Safecast web map, 2020 265
22.17 Screenshot from Cosmic Web, Kim Albrecht, 2016 266
22.18 “Top of Chimborazo 21000 Feet from the Level of the Sea,” Almira Hart
Lincoln Phelps, 1831 268
23.1 Graph demonstrating iconicity 272
23.2 Geometrical graphic in Euclid’s Elements [300 bc] (1482) 274
23.3 First graph that combines two variables [tenth century] 274
23.4 Prototype of the bar chart by Nicole Oresme [circa 1350] 274
23.5 Graph from Galilei’s Sidereus nuncius (1610) 275
23.6 Harvey’s (1628) graphical display of blood vessels 275
23.7 Scheiner’s (1630) graph of observed spots on the Sun 275
23.8 Halley’s (1686) curvilinear plot of barometric pressure as a function of its
distance above sea level 275
23.9 Priestley’s Chart of biography (1764) 275
23.10 Example of curve fitting by Lambert (1779) 275
23.11 Increase of the price of wheat in relation to wages, from the year 1565
to 1821 by Playfair (1786) 276
23.12 Diagram showing the evolution of species in Darwin’s On the Origin of
Species (1859, p. 117) 277
23.13 Minard’s (1861) map showing the losses in men of the French army in
the Russian campaign, 1812–1813 278
23.14 Regression in hereditary stature (Galton, 1886, pp. 249–250) 279
23.15 High-frequency spectra of the chemical elements (Moseley, 1913, p. 709) 279
23.16 Use of virtual reality in data visualization 279
23.17 Example of a scatterplot with a low (left) and a high (right) data-ink ratio 282
23.18 Distribution of a linguistic variable – number of words – in the Trinity
Lancaster Corpus (N = 2,053) 283
23.19 Distribution of the age of L2 English speakers at different proficiency
levels in the Trinity Lancaster Corpus (N = 2,053) 284
23.20 Error bars that display 95% confidence intervals for lexical density across
different proficiency levels in the Trinity Lancaster Corpus (N = 2,053) 285
23.21 Regression line through a scatterplot that displays the relationship
between lexical diversity and the number of words in the Trinity
Lancaster Corpus (N = 2,053) 286
23.22 Geomap that shows the number of cases of COVID-19 in the period
December 22–29, 2020 in the ten most populated countries in Europe 287
24.1 Graphical abstract from Cell 291
24.2 Figure 6 (of 9) included in Zhang et al. (2018) 292
24.3 Before-and-after example demonstrating preferred design strategies for Cell 293
24.4 Visual abstract in an infographic format from Journal of Vascular Surgery 296
24.5 Graphical abstract from Applied Surface Science 301
24.6 Graphical abstract that relies on visual and verbal antitheses to
communicate its argument about circadian rhythms 301
25.1 Multimodality common to contemporary scientific visualizations 309

x
 Figures

25.2 Conceptual model of MIR classification within the total set of scientific
communication 311
25.3 Density slices along the y-z plane of a collapsing, turbulent prestellar
core into a massive stellar system for runs SubVir (far left column)
and Vir (center left column) with velocity vectors overplotted. The
velocity vectors are scaled as v in units of km s-1, and we only overplot
vectors for densities ≥5 × 10-20g cm-3, The two right columns show the
corresponding slices of the Eddington ratios (fEM = FWD/FPM) for runs
SubVir (center right column) and Vir (rightmost column). Each panel is
(50 kau)2, with the center of each panel corresponding to the location
of the most massive star that has formed. The time of the simulation and
mass of the most massive star are given in the upper left cornerof the far
left panels and the lower left corner of the panels in the two left columns,
respectively 312
25.4 Screenshot from the Allen Human Brain Atlas 313
25.5 Screenshots from the Reaxys database 316
25.6a–c Screenshots from the Reaxys database 317
25.7 Screenshot of the Kentucky Geologic Map Service 319
26.1 American Avocet (Recurvirostra americana) 330
30.1 Example of technical taxonomies in the technical term “tobacco
transplastomic leaves” 373

xi
 TABLES

8.1 Reasons for in-house/desk reject (n = 48) 94

8.2 Top three of three most common reasons for in-house/desk rejection 94
8.3 Cumulative ratings of reasons for peer-review rejection 95
8.4 Top three of three most common reasons for peer review rejection 96
8.5 Skills that the manuscript submission and peer review process implicitly
teach authors 97
10.1 Top concerns of authors when publishing their findings 114
10.2 Major impact assessment tools for published science 116
11.1 Examples of common regulatory documents and their functions 126
13.1 Average size of texts by section 148
13.2 Proportion of MED subgenres across the corpus sample 149
13.3 Generic profile of medical editorials 150
15.1 Process of a “scientific fact” contributing to knowledge construction in science 174
16.1 Move analysis applied to grant proposal abstracts 183
16.2 Points included in the NCS handout for grant proposal organization 184
18.1 Interviewee descriptions 203
19.1 Case report checklists from CARE Guidelines and BMJ Case Reports 218
23.1 Examples of scientific milestones of data visualization 274
24.1 Graphical abstract guidelines for Applied Surface Science and Cell 299
24.2 Sources of tweets 304
24.3 Purposes of tweets 304
25.1 Tools for creating multimodal and interactive representations 315
30.1 Various attributes characterizing three text genres: PSL, APL, and popular
articles 376
31.1 Science communication training programs involved in the study 383
31.2 Self-reported experience with science communication activities in Israeli
versus U.S.- based scientists 384
31.3 Coding scheme for assessing participants’ skills 385
31.4 Characteristics of scientists’ popular texts written prior (n = 118) and after
(n = 39) science communication training 390

xii
 CONTRIBUTORS

Moriah Ariely is a postdoctoral fellow and a teachers’ instructor at the Department of Science
Teaching, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, and a high school biology teacher. Her research
focuses on developing and implementing new teaching strategies aimed to promote students’
and teachers’ scientific disciplinary literacy.
Ayelet Baram-Tsabari is a Professor at the Faculty of Education in Science and Technology
at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology and heads the Applied Science Communication
research group. Her research focuses on the interactions between science education, science
literacy, and public engagement with science in real-life scenarios.
Yael Barel-Ben David is Director of the Citizen Lab – a hub for citizen science in communities
and in schools. Her research focuses on science communication training for scientists, their
effectiveness, and how the public interacts with the products of these trainings as a way to
examine their success.
Begoña Bellés-Fortuño is a senior lecturer in the Department of English Studies at Universitat
Jaume I, Spain. She is Editor in Chief of Language Value journal and one of the executive
directors of IBERICA Journal and Director of the Interuniversity Institute of Modern Applied
Languages (IULMA) at Universitat Jaume I. Her research interests are focused on Discourse
Analysis and, more concretely, academic discourse both written and spoken.
Marina Bondi is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Modena and Reggio
Emilia, where she coordinates the PhD program in Human Sciences. She has published
extensively in the field of genre analysis, EAP, and corpus linguistics, with a focus on language
variation across genres, disciplines, cultures, and media.
Raffaella Bottini is a doctoral researcher at the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social
Science, Lancaster University. Her research interests include corpus linguistics, statistics, second
language acquisition, language teaching and testing. She focuses on the application of corpus
methods to the analysis of vocabulary in spoken learner corpora.
Vaclav Brezina is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Linguistics and English Language
and a member of the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science, Lancaster

xiii
 Contributors

University. His research interests are in the areas of statistics, data visualization, corpus design
and methodology. He is the author of Statistics in Corpus Linguistics (CUP, 2018).
Jonathan Buehl is an associate professor in the Department of English at the Ohio State
University. He is the author of Assembling Arguments: Multimodal Rhetoric and Scientific Discourse
and the coeditor (with Alan Gross) of Science and the Internet: Communicating Knowledge in a
Digital Age.
Lauren E. Cagle is Assistant Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the
University of Kentucky. Cagle researches environmental, technical, and scientific rhetoric, often
in collaboration with practitioner organizations, such as the Kentucky Division for Air Quality,
the Kentucky Geological Survey, and The Arboretum, State Botanical Garden of Kentucky.
Lillian Campbell is Assistant Professor of English at Marquette University. Her research
focuses on the rhetoric of health and medicine, technical and professional communication, and
feminist rhetorics. Her publications can be found in Technical Communication Quarterly, Written
Communication, Rhetoric of Health and Medicine, and The Journal of Writing Research.
James N. Corcoran is Assistant Professor of English as a Second Language and Applied
Linguistics in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at York University. His
research interests include language teacher education, (critical) English for specific/academic
purposes, and relations of power in global academic knowledge production.
Danielle DeVasto is Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing at Grand Valley
State University. Her research interests reside at the intersections of visual rhetoric, science
communication, and uncertainty. Her work has been published in Communication Design
Quarterly, Community Literacy Journal, Present Tense, and Social Epistemology.
Lisa DeTora is Associate Professor of Writing Studies and Rhetoric and Director of STEM
Writing at Hofstra University. She is the editor of Regulatory Writing: An Overview (2017,
2020). Her scholarship bridges biomedical writing, rhetorics of health and medicine, technical
communication, graphic narrative research, and the medical humanities.
Karen Englander is based at the International Foundation Program of the University of
Toronto, bringing more than 15 years of working with and researching international scientists
and scholars while Professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, Mexico. She
analyzes these experiences through the lenses of policy, pedagogy, and critical theory.
Maurizio Gotti is Emeritus Professor of English Language and Translation at the University of
Bergamo. His main research areas are the features and origins of specialized discourse, both in a
synchronic and diachronic perspective. He is a member of the editorial boards of international
journals and edits the Linguistic Insights series for Peter Lang.
Susanne Hall is Teaching Professor of Writing and Director of the Hixon Writing Center
at Caltech. She is the editor of Prompt: A Journal of Academic Writing Assignments. Her work
has appeared in AILA Review, Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, and Journal of
Microbiology and Biology Education.
Glenn Hampson is the founder and executive director of the Science Communication Institute
(SCI), a US-based nonprofit focused on improving the communication that happens inside
science. He also directs the Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI), a UN-backed effort designing
sustainable global policies for open science and other open solutions.

xiv
 Contributors

Ken Hyland is Professor of Applied Linguistics in education at the University of East Anglia.
He is best known for his research into academic writing, having published over 260 articles and
28 books with 58,000 citations on Google Scholar. A collection of his work was published by
Bloomsbury in 2018.
Natasha N. Jones is a technical communication scholar. Her research interests include
social justice, narrative, and technical communication pedagogy. She holds herself especially
accountable to Black women and marginalized genders and other systemically marginalized
communities. She currently serves as the vice president for the Association of Teachers of
Technical Writing and is Associate Professor at Michigan State University.
Tomás Koch Ewertz holds a PhD from Ghent University and is currently a faculty member at
Universidad de Playa Ancha, Chile. His interests include scholarly communication, sociology of
science, and higher education studies. He is also a member of the Observatorio de Participación
Social y Territorio, Universidad de Playa Ancha.
Kalie Leonard is a lecturer in the English department at the University of Wyoming, where she
primarily teaches technical and scientific writing courses. Leonard’s primary research interests
include the (changing) conventions of scientific posters, as well as the purpose of posters as a
form of scientific communication.
Kate Maddalena teaches writing and media studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga.
Dr. Maddalena’s interests include media theory, science and technology studies (STS), and
science communication. Her work has been published in journals such as Theory, Culture, and
Society, the International Journal of Communication, Canadian Journal of Communication, and Project
on the Rhetoric of Inquiry (POROI).
Jennifer C. Mallette is an associate professor of English at Boise State University, where she
collaborates with engineering faculty to support student writers. Her research builds on those
collaborations, examining best practices for integrating writing into engineering curriculum;
she also explores women’s experiences in engineering settings through the context of writing.
Justin Mando is an associate professor of science and technical writing at Millersville Univer-
sity. His recent book is titled Fracking and the Rhetoric of Place: How We Argue from Where
We Stand. He has published in Environmental Communication, Composition Studies, and Dis-
course & Communication. He received his Ph.D. in Rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University.
Maureen A. Mathison is Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric Studies at the
University of Utah. Her research interests include STEM studies and disciplinary rhetorics.
Her publications include Sojourning in Disciplinary Cultures: A Case Study of Teaching Writing in
Engineering, as well as multiple articles and book contributions.
Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language
and Literature at the University of Waterloo, author of Science Communication Online: Engaging
Experts and Publics on the Internet (OSU Press, 2019), and coeditor, with Carolyn R. Miller, of
Emerging Genres in New Media Environments (Palgrave, 2017).
Brad Mehlenbacher is Professor of Rhetoric and Communication in the Department
of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. His research focuses on
communication and learning in technical, scientific, and engineering contexts. He is author of
the award-winning Instruction and Technology: Designs for Everyday Learning (MIT Press, 2010).

xv
 Contributors

Jenna Morton-Aiken is Assistant Professor of Humanities, Writing Program Administra-

tor, and Director of Writing across the Curriculum at Massachusetts Maritime Academy. Her
research has appeared in Technical Communication Quarterly, WPA Writing Program Administration,
and other publications. She helped launch SciWrite@URI and is a recipient of the 2018–2019
CCCC Emergent Researcher Award.
Judy Noguchi is Professor Emerita of Kobe Gakuin University, Japan. She has been involved
in research and teaching of English for specific purposes in science, engineering, and medical
sciences. Her PhD work at the University of Birmingham was on the review article and its role
in knowledge construction.
Mya Poe is Associate Professor of English at Northeastern University. Her books include
Learning to Communicate in Science and Engineering, Race and Writing Assessment, and Writing,
Assessment, Social Justice, and Opportunity to Learn. She is series coeditor of the Oxford Brief
Guides to Writing in the Disciplines.
Amy D. Propen is Associate Professor of Writing at the University of California, Santa Bar-
bara. She is author of Visualizing Posthuman Conservation in the Age of the Anthropocene (The Ohio
State University Press, 2018) and Locating Visual-Material Rhetorics: The Map, the Mill, and the
GPS (Parlor Press, 2012).
Gwendolynne Reid is Assistant Professor of English and directs the writing program at Oxford
College of Emory University. Her research examines writing in disciplinary and professional
contexts and can be found in Science and Engineering Ethics, Written Communication, and Across the
Disciplines, as well as several edited collections.
Colleen A. Reilly is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in professional and scientific writing. She has
published articles and book chapters related to scientific writing, privacy and surveillance in
digital spaces, and genders, sexualities, and technologies.
Cheryl L. Sheridan, PhD English (Composition and TESOL), is Assistant Professor of
National Chengchi University’s Foreign Language Center in Taipei, Taiwan. Her research into
academic writing, multilingual researchers’ publishing experiences, and national scholarly jour-
nals has appeared in ESP, Global Academic Publishing: Policies, Perspectives, and Pedagogies, and
Written Communication.
Michelle Sidler is Associate Professor of technical and professional communication at Auburn
University. Her research interests include scientific publishing, grant writing, and technical
editing. She currently serves on a university-sponsored grant with Rural Studio’s Front Porch
Initiative, an innovative architectural program dedicated to rural housing.
Sabrina Sobel is Professor of Chemistry and formerly chair of her department. She has served
on three rounds of development of ACS standard undergraduate inorganic chemistry exams
and has collaborated with Lisa DeTora on various pedagogical initiatives including Seminars in
Chemistry and a summer precollegiate program for students interested in STEM fields.
Sarah Tinker Perrault is Associate Professor in the School of Writing Literature, and Film,
and also Director of the Writing Intensive Curriculum program at Oregon State University.
Chad Wickman is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Auburn University. He
teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in writing and rhetorical studies, and his current

xvi
 Contributors

research explores intersections between technical discourse and knowledge-making in the life
sciences.
Anat Yarden is Professor of Science Education, head of the department, and head of the Life
Sciences Group at the Department of Science Teaching, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.
Her group pioneered the adaption of primary scientific literature for the teaching and learning
of biology in high schools.

xvii
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We are grateful to the York College of Pennsylvania Faculty Development Committee for a
Research and Publication Grant to support the indexing of the book.

xix
 INTRODUCTION
Michael J. Zerbe, Gabriel Cutrufello, Cristina Hanganu-Bresch
and Stefania M. Maci

This handbook approaches the study of scientific communication from a primarily rhetorical
perspective, though some chapters also contain some linguistic and narrative analysis as well.
A rhetorical perspective is a form of textual analysis that focuses on the purpose(s) of a text, bear-
ing in mind the text’s effectiveness with respect to one or more target audiences. A rhetorical
perspective, like other forms of textual analysis, is informed and shaped by organizational, national,
and cultural contexts. Additionally, this handbook largely considers scientific communication—
communication among scientists, including, in some cases, citizen scientists who participate in the
scientific process—rather than science communication—communication between scientists and
nonscientists, a topic that is covered in the Routledge Handbook of Public Communication of Science and
Technology. Finally, this handbook considers science as the largely inductive, experimental process
that is characterized in general by partition, measurement, and quantitative analysis and that has
evolved since the Scientific Revolution, centered mostly in Europe, in the late 1600s.
It is fair to say that today no rhetoric defines our lives more than scientific rhetoric. As the
form of rhetoric most commonly perceived as a source of knowledge, reality, and truth, scien-
tific rhetoric occupies a dominant, privileged position among the types of rhetorics that shape
human experience. Scientific rhetoric creates and consumes vast amounts of discursive energy
for issues from the monumental—how will climate change impact our world, and does my child
have autism, based on the authoritative Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th
edition) criteria?—to the mundane—what kind of tomato should we purchase for today’s meal?
Given its enormous epistemological and ontological potential, then, scientific rhetoric deserves
careful, continual analysis from scholars of rhetoric and communication. Additionally, scientists
need to be aware of the powerful role that scientific rhetoric plays in our culture and attend to
their work with this discourse assiduously and ethically.
Right from the start, scientific communication sought to distinguish itself from other forms
of human communication. It aspired to rise above the fray of unending, intractable, and use-
less squabbles that, according to early proponents of science (or “natural philosophy” as it was
called then), dominated intellectual rhetorics at the start of the Scientific Revolution in the late
1600s and for many centuries prior. Great Britain’s Royal Society of London for Improving
Natural Knowledge, one of the first scientific societies in the world, formed shortly after the
Académie Montmor in France, immediately determined that one of its central tasks would be
developing and describing a new kind of language that would create new knowledge and solve

1 DOI: 10.4324/9781003043782-1
 Michael J. Zerbe et al.

problems rather than be bogged down in unceasing disputes that had not benefited humankind
in any way for millennia. Indeed, the Royal Society’s historian, Bishop Thomas Sprat, writing
in 1667, laments “what wonders [science] would in all likelihood have produced before this,
if [science] had been begun in the times of the Greeks, or Romans” (i.e. approximately 400
bce to 100 ce) (p. 116), and he complains bitterly about rhetoric, describing it as “this vicious
abundance of phrase, this trick of metaphors, this volubility of tongue” (p. 112). The language of
the new science, Sprat contends, would be devoid of rhetoric because it would strive “to reject
all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to the primitive purity,
and shortness, when [people] delivered so many things, almost in an equal number of words”
(p. 113). Scientific communication would also, Sprat continues, be characterized by “a close,
natural, naked way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses, a native easiness: bringing all
things as near the mathematical plainness as they can: and preferring the language of artisans,
countrymen [sic], and merchants, before that, or wits, or scholars” (p. 113). The Royal Society,
then, sought to initiate nothing short of a complete revolution of language in its efforts to
establish science as an important and worthwhile enterprise for the betterment of humankind.
Sprat’s goal of equating “things” and “words” was intended to eliminate the vagaries of
interpretation in scientific communication and indeed all forms of communication. Sometimes
referred to as the windowpane theory of language, the idea was that a word should mean
exactly the same thing to everyone: in other words, metaphorically, the word is on one side
of the transparent windowpane, the thing is on the other side, and one should always be able
to think of the exact thing when the word is used because the thing is clearly visible through
the window. Indeed, early proponents of science such as Francis Bacon were enamored of
Chinese and other pictographic (or logographic as linguists would describe it) languages because
they thought that a visual symbol was much more representative of the signified object than
a phonetically based word. In The Advancement of Learning (published in 1605), for example,
Bacon wrote, “[W]e understand further that it is the use of China and the kingdoms of the high
Levant to write in Characters Real, which express neither letters nor words in gross, but Things
or Notions” (p. 166). The goal was for phonetically based European languages, then, to achieve
this same high—but utterly imagined—degree of correspondence between text and object.
The Royal Society’s pronouncements about language, along with similar attempts to tame
scientific rhetoric elsewhere in Europe, were not left uncontested. Italian humanist Giambattista
Vico, in 1709, argued in On the Study Methods of Our Time that “Nature and life are full of
incertitude” (p. 15) and that students, instead of speaking and writing only of absolutes, should
be taught how to confront probability, opinion, and debate. In fact, Vico was alarmed by the
prospect of students who were taught to communicate only complete truths or falsehoods
associated with science, saying that such an approach would result in “odd or arrogant behavior”
that would “render young people unfit” (p. 13) for human interaction because they would not
know how to cope with difference or to negotiate with people. It would be far better, Vico
continues, for students to learn about ethos and pathos appeals in addition to logos appeals and
to think about audience. As Vico explains:

Our young [people], because of their training [in science], are unable to engage in the
life of the community, to conduct themselves with sufficient wisdom and prudence;
nor can they infuse into their speech a familiarity with human psychology or permeate
their utterances with passion. When it comes to the matter of prudential behavior in
life, it is well for us to keep in mind that human events are dominated by Chance and
Choice, which are extremely subject to change.
(p. 34)

2
 Introduction

Ultimately, Vico’s resistance proved futile as science embarked on an astonishingly prolific 300-
year record of triumph in medicine, energy, transportation, communication, and agriculture
that has utterly transformed the human race and the world around us. To be sure, along with
this remarkable progress, science has also made war and the large-scale killing of human beings
and the destruction of the environment not only possible but also prevalent. In any case, because
of this chronicle of advancement, scientific discourse has solidified its reputation as truthful,
neutral, objective, and universal, and, by the twentieth century, it largely replaced religious
rhetoric as a dominant source of knowledge, reality, and truth.
Only in the past 75 years have questions about the infallibility of scientific rhetoric once
again been effectively broached. Asking these questions has proved to be a challenge. Until the
nineteenth century, science was a public spectacle and a public rhetoric. Scientific demonstra-
tions took place in public venues and even in private homes as a form of entertainment for
guests attending an afternoon tea or soirée. Scientific topics and debates were widely covered
in the popular press and discussed by the (nonscientist) reading public (Shuttleworth and Can-
tor, 2004), and, like other prominent cultural institutions, science was a ripe target for satire
(Paradis, 1997). By the beginning of the twentieth century, though, much science had moved
into laboratories as its need for larger and more sophisticated instrumentation and controlled
environments grew (Shapin, 1988). Now increasingly segregated from the public, science con-
tinued its record of success, but scientific communication disappeared from popular sources as
the number of specialized scientific journals rapidly proliferated. Scientific rhetoric became
steadily more characterized by highly technical terminology, Bishop Sprat’s early pleas to use
simple language notwithstanding, as scientists found that they needed a more precise lexicon
to describe and interpret the phenomena they were observing. The use of passive voice and a
restrained, obscured pathos were also progressively more common features of scientific rhetoric,
leading to a perception of scientific discourse as neutral and objective but also highly complex
and unable to be clearly understood by nonscientists; as a result, the general public no longer
regularly participated in discussions about science. Although all of these changes in scientific
communication potentially made its analysis more difficult, theorists such as Perelman and
Olbrechts-Tyteca proceeded apace, in their New Rhetoric published in 1958, by questioning the
scope of science and its ability to solve all human problems:

The increased confidence thus brought about in the procedures and results of the
mathematical and natural sciences went hand in hand with the casting aside of all the
other means of proof, which were considered devoid of scientific value. Now this
attitude was quite justifiable as long as there was the hope of finding a scientifically
defensible solution to all actual human problems through an increasingly wide appli-
cation of the calculus of probabilities. But if essential problems involving questions of
a moral, social, political, philosophical, or religious order by their very nature elude
the methods of the mathematical and natural sciences, it does not seem reasonable to
scorn and reject all of the techniques of reasoning characteristic of deliberation and
discussion—in a word, of argumentation.
(p. 512)

So marked the beginning of attempts to vanquish Descartes’s insistence, in Discourse on Method

published in 1637, on mathematical certainty to answer every question posed by humankind,
which had severed scientific communication from rhetoric for some three centuries. Similarly,
at about the same time that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca were publishing their work, Burke
linked this preliminary critique of science more specifically to scientific rhetoric in A Grammar

3
 Michael J. Zerbe et al.

of Motives by interrogating the existence of a neutral scientific vocabulary (pp. 284–285) and by
questioning scientists’ generalizing, via metaphor, of their results (pp. 510–511). These fledgling
critiques of science and scientific rhetoric can be linked to mid-twentieth-century scientific
advances such as the atomic bomb and the highly toxic pesticide DDT, which revealed that,
while science was capable of curing long-fatal diseases and providing electricity and a means
of worldwide transportation, it had reached a point that it could also end human life and make
the planet uninhabitable. Scientists such as the physicist Robert Oppenheimer (in books such
as Science and the Common Understanding and The Open Mind) and biologist Rachel Carson (in
Silent Spring) publicly questioned science’s role in society and its trajectory with their critical
assessments of the atomic bomb (which Oppenheimer helped to develop) and DDT, respectively.
Relatedly, in 1968, James Watson, who in 1953 along with Francis Crick had elucidated the
structure of the DNA molecule, published a widely read autobiographical account of the race
to ascertain DNA’s configuration in The Double Helix, which significantly punctured scientists’
carefully crafted and maintained ethos of seriousness and objectivity. The book revealed
instead the ego-driven, competitive, and sexist nature of science with its description of the
rivalry, which may have at times even approached deception, between Watson and Crick at
the University of Cambridge and Rosalind Franklin and her colleagues at King’s College to
first establish the structure of the molecule and begin to learn how genetic information is
transferred from one generation to the next. Indeed, The Double Helix was so controversial that
its originally contracted publisher, Harvard University Press, refused to publish the book, a
decision that drew withering scorn from the Harvard student newspaper; it was later published
by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in the United Kingdom and by Atheneum Press in the United
States instead. Finally, in his famous Two Cultures lecture and subsequent book, physical chemist
and novelist C. P. Snow maintained that the humanities and sciences were so far apart that their
practitioners could no longer talk to each other coherently and that this estrangement posed a
serious obstacle to solving world problems. Thus did the intellectual winds begin to shift, and
science and scientific communication became, for the first time, the subjects of critical analysis.
Scientists and their supporters worked diligently to maintain their dominance and perceived
reputation for being able to avoid prejudice and emotion. Stories about science in the popular
and influential American magazine Life (known for its photography), for example, portrayed
science and scientists very positively during the magazine’s heyday from about 1940 to 1960.
Many of these stories included staged photographic portraits of scientists working with scien-
tific equipment and instrumentation; these portraits were intended to enhance scientists’ ethos
(Gigante, 2015).
Nevertheless, by the 1970s, the idea that scientific discourse is as fully rhetorical as any
other type of human communication reached critical mass. Theorists such as Lyotard (in The
Postmodern Condition) and Žižec (in Looking Awry: A Introduction to Jacques Lacan in Popular
Culture) described the narrative characteristics of scientific discourse. Foucault (in The Order of
Discourse) recognized the epistemological dominance of scientific rhetoric, used as a method of
controlling discourse by means of scientifically constituted distinctions between “reason” and
“madness” and between truth and falsehood, as well as by means of disciplinarity (pp. 53–55).
Additionally, scientific texts were, for the first time, analyzed rhetorically, as with Campbell’s
pioneering work (1970) on Darwin’s Origin of Species. In 1976, an article entitled “The Rhetoric
of Science,” by Wander, was published in the journal Western Speech Communication, and rhetoric
and science were finally recognized as inextricably intertwined, perhaps much to Descartes’s and
Bishop Sprat’s everlasting dismay. Work on scientific discourse by rhetoricians and communica-
tion theorists thus began in earnest. More recently, connections between rhetoric and math/
statistics have been established, such as describing statistics as the Toulminian warrant (i.e. the

4
 Introduction

logical line of reasoning that enables evidence to support a claim) (Toulmin, Rieke, and Janik,
1979) of empirical, quantitative research that is the basis of most scientific research. Such war-
rants are integral to all branches of science except for descriptive sciences such as paleontology
and theoretical work in math and physics. Building on this connection, a collection of essays
entitled Arguing with Numbers: The Intersections of Rhetoric and Mathematics, edited by Wynn and
Reyes, was released in 2021. Additionally, the arbitrary nature of the .05 P value threshold for
statistical significance, a critically important gatekeeping constraint in scientific research, has
been explored in a rhetorical history of this concept by Little (2001).
Through most of its 300-year history, science and scientific communication has largely been
a Western European, male-dominated institution, and these biases are reflected in the institu-
tion’s material manifestations and consequences. For example, during the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, French surgeon and anatomist Paul Broca and his colleagues removed
brains from corpses that they dug up in Paris cemeteries and painstakingly measured the brains’
weights and volumes. Finding that men’s brains were, in general, larger and heavier than wom-
en’s brains, Broca and his cohorts concluded that men were intellectually superior to women—a
preposterous inference, admittedly, but one that matched the prevailing cultural attitudes toward
women and that was therefore accepted as ironclad proof by nearly all white men, especially
those in positions of power and authority (Gould, 1980). And Broca did not stop with gender.
With no basis in data or logic, Broca and his colleagues extrapolated their findings to claim that
Black men had brains that were similar in weight to women’s brains and that thus Black men
could not intellectually compete with white men either (Gould 1980). Though the prestigious
scientific journal Nature conceded in a 1997 editorial that “fashionable ideas on the design of
experiments to the negotiations that take place through the peer review process” do in truth
influence science and scientific communication (“Science Wars,” p. 373), these biases have not
been eradicated. Indeed, the Nature editorial makes no mention of the fact that “fashionable
ideas,” a phrase that likely fits some instances of scientific research but trivializes the racist and
misogynistic viewpoints in others, also shape the interpretation of data and the all-important
articulation of conclusions, and science in the service of misogyny and racism continues to this
day. In 1994, reprising Broca et al.’s work from a century earlier, social science researchers Her-
rnstein and Murray conducted a retrospective statistical analysis of standardized IQ test results in
their book The Bell Curve to argue that Black people are less intelligent than white people, who
are in turn less intelligent than Asian people, and that a reason for these different levels of intel-
ligence is at least partially (between 40% and 80%) hereditary (i.e. racial) (pp. 22–23). Though
a number of critics asserted that Herrnstein and Murray made questionable assumptions as well
as dubious methodological and statistical decisions, the book’s conclusions were publicly sup-
ported by other social scientists and still exert power as evidenced by continued structural and
institutional racism. Currently, in 2021, scientific rhetoric on sickle cell trait, most commonly
found in Black people, is used to excuse police brutality even though the condition is almost
always benign because the individuals who have sickle cell trait only carry one of the two genes
needed for full-fledged sickle cell anemia to occur (LaForgia and Valentino-DeVries, 2021).
Scientific rhetoric is also used by an endowed professor of psychiatry, Paul McHugh at Johns
Hopkins University, one of the most prominent medical schools in the United States, to argue
against biological causation of sexual orientation and identity (Mayer and McHugh, 2016,
pp. 7–9) and thus to legitimize ongoing discrimination toward the LGTBQ+ community. As a
dominant cultural rhetoric, scientific rhetoric is, then, hijacked by those in power to consolidate
and maintain their authority in the same way that religious rhetoric was used in ages past.
Scientific discourse started as a trickle in the 1700s but has exploded, exponentially, to a
tsunami today. An estimated 30,000 peer-reviewed scientific journals publish some 2 million

5
 Michael J. Zerbe et al.

articles a year (Altbach and de Wit, 2018). Indeed, in Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific
Facts, Latour and Woolgar describe scientists as “almost manic writers” (1979, p. 48) who spend
a great deal of their time writing proposals, research reports, reviews, posters, and other kinds of
texts. Indeed, writing is so important to a scientist’s career that a great deal of effort is expended
on scientific communication pedagogy and ongoing professional training. In terms of genre,
scientific communication is dominated by the scientific research article, known colloquially as
IMRAD for its Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion organizational scheme. Most
professional scientists who have the responsibility of planning and managing scientific research
must publish IMRAD articles regularly in peer-reviewed journals to advance professionally
and maintain job security. At professional conferences, taking advantage of advances in com-
munication technology, scientists now present their research in the form of scientific posters.
Research proposals are another critically important genre and, chronologically, actually come
before research articles and posters because most scientists must actively pursue funding from
government sources and/or private charitable foundations to conduct their research.
Despite the now widespread acknowledgment that scientific discourse is rhetorical, it
retains its distinction as a dominant rhetoric in terms of epistemological and ontological
potential. Even so, scientific rhetoric is presently under assault in a number of areas in which
conclusions formulated on the basis of scientific research and evidence are at odds with the
religious, political, and/or otherwise ideological views of various population groups. The
attacks on scientific rhetoric can be seen most clearly in the flashpoint issues of vaccine
safety and effectiveness, climate change, evolution, and genetically modified foods (i.e.
genetically modified organisms, or GMOs). Anti-vaxxers and those who are hesitant to use
vaccines dispute their necessity and efficacy in large part because of the infamous (and since
retracted) 1998 article by Wakefield et al. that attempted to link the administration of the
measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine to autism (Wakefield et al., 1998). Many anti-vaxxers
and vaccine hesitant individuals reject the finding that Wakefield’s research was fraudulent,
research that disproves Wakefield’s theory, and any other scientific and medical work that
demonstrates that vaccines are overwhelmingly safe and effective, and many also insist that
vaccine mandates are a breach of freedom. Their distrust of any scientific discourse except
that which supports their previously determined ideological views is a hallmark of the other
flashpoints as well. For example, efforts to fight climate change are obstructed by wealthy,
powerful energy corporations whose executives seek to protect profits, at least until they can
determine how to make even more money in a post–fossil fuel world (Sikka, 2012), as well as
by people who view recycling and attempts to reduce carbon use as an infringement of their
individual rights. Religious fundamentalists continue to insist that evolution is a debatable
theory that should compete on an equal footing with the belief that a deity created life. Anti-
GMO activists contend that any food that is genetically modified potentially risks human
health, the environment, and/or socioeconomic stability. In sum, what all of these flashpoint
issues demonstrate is that scientists today face a potent rhetorical challenge in that many
nonscientists rebuff logos and ethos appeals, the mainstay of persuasion in scientific research,
out of hand. In fact, the tentative tone of the Discussion section in scientific research articles,
with its de rigueur use of hedges such as “suggest,” “may,” and “possibly,” is often used against
scientists by those who seize on such phrasing to argue that the scientist’s conclusions are not
proven. Additionally, special interest groups who work to keep all of these flashpoint issues in
the public spotlight, each of them a “manufactured scientific controversy” (Ceccarelli, 2011,
p. 196), employ well -credentialed and occasionally prominent scientists who will, often (mis)
using scientific rhetoric, say what the special interest groups want them to say.

6
 Introduction

Today, scientific communication is a behemoth. It is an enormous, powerful, profitable,

worldwide institution that formidably influences nearly every person on Earth—the vast
majority of them as stakeholders rather than as writers or readers/listeners—as well as the
planet itself. It is now as much a visual rhetoric as a textual rhetoric, given the development
of the Internet and social media platforms, the use of posters at conferences, and the advent
of graphical abstracts. As with any large, complex institution, scientific communication faces
a wide range of challenges that need to be addressed. First, the use of English as a lingua
franca for scientific communication is perhaps advantageous in terms of efficiency and
comprehension but hinders those for whom attaining English fluency is an obstacle.
Additionally, given that different languages are different ways of thinking, English-only
scientific communication limits the scope and understanding of science. Second, the
evaluation of science and scientific communication has become far more complicated
because of the sheer amount of research that is conducted and published and the potential for
conflicts of interest that, to be fair, many editors of leading scientific journals and publishers
work hard to prevent. Even so, retractions are now so common that a now popular website,
www.retractionwatch.org, has been established to track them. Third, the pressure to publish
is at times so intense that researchers will engage in dubious practices such as P-hacking (i.e.
manipulating data until a statistically significant result is found) and author inflation (i.e.
adding names of authors who contributed little or nothing to the research to the article so
that they will get publication credit). Indeed, quantitatively scoring the impact of scientific
journals and the number of publications a scientist has contributed to is now a major industry
in and of itself, and P-hacking, also known as significance chasing and data dredging, is now
more possible than ever with the arrival of big data (see the 2021 special issue of POROI for
work on rhetorical approaches to big data). Fourth, access to scientific communication poses
a lofty hurdle because of the skyrocketing cost of journal and database subscriptions. While
open access endeavors such as PLoS (Public Library of Science) have gained a foothold,
most scientific communication remains behind an expensive paywall. Fifth, both practition-
ers and scholars of scientific communication must consider the issue of science literacy and
vigorously combat the notion that scientific information is too complex for nonscientists
to understand. Ideas, even complex ones, can and should be explained clearly to any kind
of audience by communicators willing to spend sufficient time and energy to determine
the most rhetorically effective way to reach them. As a corollary, scientific communication
should develop and implement rhetorical strategies to enable science to attract a more diverse
population. Sixth, and perhaps most importantly, practitioners and scholars must ensure that
the “ethic of expediency” (Katz, 1992, p. 255), the idea that human life is downplayed so
drastically in scientific rhetoric that tragedies such as the Holocaust become possible, does
not define scientific communication.
By addressing these challenges, scientific communication and science may become less iso-
lated institutions that are more responsive to the needs of all humankind, not just those of the
wealthy and powerful. A key to this more promising future is for practitioners and scholars of
scientific communication to find a balance between supporting ethical, settled science and cri-
tiquing unethical and/or poorly executed science (Ceccarelli, 2011, p. 218). As evidenced by
CRISPR, the recently developed method to target and manipulate DNA, science treats nature
itself as a text, which it works to analyze and annotate, as with DNA’s textual characterization
in the form of letters to represent the four bases that constitute the molecule (Zerbe, 2019).
As such, both practitioners and scholars of scientific communication have a lot to offer to this
critically important field.

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This book was completed during a very strange and challenging time in history, especially
in medical and scientific history: the global coronavirus pandemic that spanned most of 2020
and 2021. During this time, scientific production and communication have been in overdrive,
as researchers rushed to understand the origins, pathology, and course of treatment for the
virus that paralyzed the world for an unprecedentedly long time in modern history. Many of
the chapters in this collection have in fact started to address what that has meant for scientific
communication and how this event will alter the pace of publication, the peer review pro-
cesses, public understanding of science, and many other related issues (see, for example, Poe
(Chapter 4), Mallette (Chapter 12), DeTora and Sobel (Chapter 11), Noguchi (Chapter 15),
Maddalena (Chapter 27), and Reid (Chapter 29), this volume). While the definitive history
of the COVID-19 pandemic and its implications for scientific communication remains to be
written, we need to acknowledge that such events are going to happen more rather than less
frequently and that science communication needs to remain extraordinarily supple and adapt-
able to these new challenges.

Section and chapter summaries

This handbook is divided into four sections: Scientific Research, Writing, and Publishing; Sci-
entific Communication Genres; Scientific Visuals and Multimedia; and Scientific Communica-
tion Pedagogy. We have decided on this organization based on our perception of the current
areas of interest in scientific communication. The topics in the first section aim to address some
of the many challenges that confront scientific communication today—including the exponen-
tial growth of publishing and research, ethics, authorship, racism, sexism, predatory publishing,
English as the de facto language of international science, measuring impact, assessing cita-
tion practices, scientific collaboration, and the emergence of citizen science. How we encode
knowledge in genres, visualize it, and transmit it to others forms the focus of the remainder of
the book. Methodologies used in the chapters that comprise the handbook include case studies,
historical accounts, critical perspectives, and empirical approaches.
In Part 1: Scientific Research, Writing, and Publishing, the contributors explore the
landscape of writing for publication in the sciences as a central activity to the work of scientific
researchers. Ken Hyland describes scholarly publishing and, while discussing how academic
publication has evolved over the last 50 years, explains the incredible rise of the number of journals,
the Anglicization process of publication (cf. English as a T-Rex, Swales, 1997), the “publish
or perish” pressure authors have had, the trend toward journal specialization, the relevance on
citation and journal indexing, all of which, ultimately, have put an emphasis on the quantitative
more than the qualitative aspects of research dissemination. Sarah Tinker Perrault details the
ways that the concept of authorship has developed in order to assign credit, ownership, and
responsibility for scientific work. Michelle Sidler draws a broad picture of open access’s impact on
scientific publishing, including a look at its history, rationale, evolution, and current international
landscape. Mya Poe reviews how ethical standards are negotiated in regard to authorship, text
recycling, data integrity, and peer review, which are to be understood as deeply influenced by
the ways that scientists make knowledge in the global scientific community today. Natasha N.
Jones examines the implications of racism and white supremacy in scientific communication
scholarship and pedagogy, focusing in particular on testimonial quieting and self-censorship
and their reverberations on how we practice, teach, and experience science and science com-
munication. Lillian Campbell examines the relationship between feminism and scientific
communication by recounting the history of women scientists and their rhetorical practices
and discussing current challenges. Brad Mehlenbacher and Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher

8
 Introduction

review the scholarship around scientific peer review, which they view as an imperfect “socially
constructed knowledge-making activity” bound by historical and institutional constraints,
among others. They focus in particular on the issue of expertise in peer review and identify and
discuss current peer review trends such as training, transparency, and preprints, and data sharing.
Cheryl L. Sheridan’s chapter on the editorial review process of Taiwan-based science journals
investigates journal editors’ approach and thoughts on their role in the development of scientists
as communicators. Tomás Koch Ewertz looks at the history and role of citations in scientific
publications, with special emphasis on the meaning and pitfalls of modern bibliometric indicators
and how such tools influence citation practices. Glenn Hampson explores the perceptions and
practices associated with the measurement of impact of scientific research articles. Lisa DeTora
and Sabrina Sobel provide an overview of scientific collaborative practices in the context
of various genres and settings in which scientists have to function, with special emphasis on
regulatory practices. Jennifer C. Mallette examines the nature of citizen science and public
science and what it means for the creation and communication of scientific knowledge. Maur-
izio Gotti explores the globalizing effects of English as the dominant scientific language in the
context of a lengthy research project conducted at CERLIS, an institute devoted to the research
of specialized discourse at the University of Bergamo. The research highlights the homogeniz-
ing and localizing trends in academic usage, which vary according to multiple factors including
discipline, expertise, genre expectations, as well as local tradition and culture.
In Part 2: Scientific Communication Genres, the contributors investigate the various
genres used in scientific communication to disseminate research to various audiences. Marina
Bondi surveys the history and development of the all-important original scientific research
report, now known almost universally by the acronym IMRAD (Introduction, Methods,
Results, and Discussion), which is the genre’s organizational structure. Judy Noguchi surveys
the evolution and many forms and functions of the review article, arguing that the genre will
undergo further evolution driven by the accelerated pace of publication and advances in data
management software. Begoña Bellés-Fortuño provides a historical overview of proposals as
research genres, summarizing multiple perspectives, such as the rhetorical moves of proposals,
linguistic corpus analyses, and sociocognitive and dialogic dimensions of proposals. Colleen
A. Reilly explores the evolution of grant proposals to the U.S. federal government funding
agencies, National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, and comments
on grant writing aspects of professional development programs for early career scientists.
Kalie Leonard presents the results of an empirical study of scientists’ attitudes toward the use
of jargon in posters and their impressions of the future of poster design. Chad Wickman
explores the genre of the medical case report, focusing on recent developments such as the
CARE (CAse REport) guidelines and noting that case reports offer an opportunity for patient
experience and agency. Maureen Mathison charts the history of scientific letters and com-
mentaries and demonstrate that these genres of scientific communication are an understudied
genre that help to illuminate the societal concerns of researchers. Justin Mando provides
three case studies of nontraditional communication of science that demonstrate scientists act-
ing in the role of citizens; the goal of such communication is to be both socially responsive
and critically reflective.
In Part 3: Scientific Visuals and Multimedia, the contributors present research on
the role of visual information (in print and digitally) in scientific communication. Danielle
DeVasto explores the history of data visualization to demonstrate its long-standing centrality
to scientific communication and provides 18 images as examples of the broad range of types
of visuals and their uses in scientific communication. Vaclav Brezina and Raffaella Bottini
provide a brief historical overview of data visualization with a focus on its core functions,

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interaction, and mutual replaceability for successful scientific communication. Jonathan Buehl
examines the history, theory, and current usage of increasingly popular graphical abstracts via a
series of case studies. Lauren E. Cagle helps to further refine the definitions of multimodality
in light of interactive technologies intended to enhance scientific communication. Amy D.
Propen investigates how citizen scientists use eBird to help develop visual information and
other important data that aids in scientific communication.
In Part 4: Scientific Communication Pedagogy, the contributors detail a variety of
pedagogical approaches and offer examples of classroom teaching, programmatic design, and
institutional support for scientific communication learning. Kate Maddalena reviews three
overlapping areas of scientific and science communication pedagogy and argues that teachers
of scientific communication should focus on “embedded work,” learning to communicate as
part of the scientific research process. To help alleviate the biases and problems associated with
English-dominant science, James N. Corcoran and Karen Englander propose an adapt-
able pedagogy for scientists in training that recognizes and draws on the strengths of their
plurilingual abilities. Gwendolynne Reid proposes and explains a list of threshold concepts
for scientific writing: (1) scientific writing is central to scientific inquiry; (2) scientific writ-
ing is rhetorical; (3) scientific genres serve distinct purposes in scientific genre ecosystems; and
(4) scientific writing and language are contested and dynamic. These concepts can serve as
stepping stones in all programs dealing with scientific literacy and communication and open a
fruitful space of dialogue for any pedagogical practice in this field. Moriah Ariely and Anat
Yarden introduce Adapted primary literature (APL) as an apprenticeship genre for promoting
scientific literacy in high schools. Yael Barel-Ben David and Ayelet Baram-Tsabari look at
several models of training programs in science communication for practicing scientists and assess
these interventions in terms of efficacy. They conclude that such writing training is necessary
and beneficial but that results may vary and long-term interventions may be considered to hone
certain high-level communication skills. Jenna Morton-Aiken details the work undertaken to
restart the WAC program at Massachusetts Maritime Academy. Using the Populations, Land-
scapes, Infrastructure, and Assessment framework, Dr. Morton-Aiken demonstrates how local
context can be analyzed to help situate the work of WAC programs. Susanne Hall discusses
the value of having STEM disciplinary experts working in the Writing Center. She argues that
a tutor’s expertise can and should be brought into the tutoring session to better help STEM
writers.
This Handbook is directed at an audience of scientists, health care professionals, and other
kinds of researchers who need to write and publish in their scientific, medical, or techno-
logical fields, as well as at professional science and technical writers and academics involved
in the study, practice, and teaching of scientific, medical, and technical communication to
undergraduate and graduate students. The exploration of scientific literature that the Handbook
presents is a State-of-Scientific-Communication report for the early twenty-first century that
offers scientists a critical look at the complex relationships characterizing current scientific
practices in academia, industry, government, and elsewhere. The Handbook also identifies the
drivers influencing domain-specific processes and discursive practices which seem more and
more realized in rhetorical, pragmatic, and microlinguistic features indicative of (new) con-
verging communicative practices. We hope that this volume is of use to scholars and teachers
of scientific communication but also to practitioners of science, as it offers multiple, up-to-
date perspectives (historical, theoretical, or empirical) on issues of heightened contemporary
interest in this field.

10
 Introduction

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