The problem at the heart of this report stems from the observation that many emerging biology professionals lack mastery in the diverse writing genres crucial for their roles. This gap can hinder their ability to effectively communicate scientific ideas and proposals, thereby impacting their career progression and the scientific community’s ability to collaborate and evolve.

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Academic writing typically focuses more on the audience than professional writing does.

What are 2 possible reasons for Academic Writing ?

n scientific research, race remains a quandary. Some researchers assert that race, as a variable, captures meaningful plots of genetic ancestry – an opportunity to further big dreams like personalized medicine and ethno-pharmacogenomics. Others argue that biologic concepts of race are inextricably yoked to notions of eugenics, bigotry and burden, and decry their continued presence in medical journals. Somewhere in the middle, the inconsistencies of race in medicine perplex and gnaw at uncertain scientists, who are intimidated by the prospect of inescapable damnation. Yet despite the uncomfortable ambiguities that surround race and medicine, the variable remains present as a well-worn neighbour of scientific inquiry.Whether race provides meaningful information in scientific research is debatable; notwithstanding, race remains to be closely associated with scientific inquiry.Even though the inclusion of race in scientific research is disputed, race still plays a part in scientific research.The ongoing debate of whether to include race in scientific research makes it difficult for researchers to choose whether or not to include race in their study.While some researchers include race as a variable in their study, some do not, and the rest are ambivalent about the inclusion of race in their study.

The use of the Internet to support scientific communication is one of the major shifts in the practice of science in this era and it has generated numerous experiments and significant discussion. In the scientific communities, these communications include informal e-mail, the communication of conference programs as they gel, the sharing of preprints, access to electronic versions of journal articles, and the development of shared disciplinary corpuses. These communicative practices are becoming more important in many fields, although they are rarely the central communications media. However, only a few analyses take sufficient account of the ways in which the social dimensions of publications, such as the design of electronic journals, influence their use (see, for example, Kling and Covi, 1995).One common approach to conceptualizing new forms such as electronic journals, on-line newspapers, electronic forums, Web sites and digital libraries emphasizes their technologically-based information-processing features, such as enabling authors and readers to communicate more directly without the mediation of libraries or expensive publishers. The socio-technical approach, explained below, views these new forms as mixing together both technological elements and social relationships into an effectively inseparable ensemble.From a technological information processing perspective, new media such as electronic journals3, databases, preprint servers -- are said to reduce the costs of communication, expand the range of people and locations from which materials are accessible, and generally speed communications. According to this view, as scholars in all scientific fields work with data, and communicate both formally and informally with other scholars, all of these electronic media forums should be adopted and used fairly uniformly. Differences in value would rest upon the differences in technical architectures. For example, readers would be more likely to read electronic journal A rather than journal B if journal A added more informational value, such as having an elaborate set of cross links between articles, or including more extensive sets of data and graphics.Even the strongest proponents of electronic journals agree that technological design alone is not sufficient to insure a good quality journal. There is a strong consensus that the quality of a journal�s scholarly content is important in making it viable, but there is substantial disagreement about the means of attracting high quality materials. All the proposals and counter proposals for attracting high quality authors rest on social analyses of a journal, rather than purely technological analyses. For example, one aspect electronic journals that is commonly discussed is the role of peer review4. There are many ways of organizing peer reviews, but each strategy for selecting reviewers and translating their assessments into feedback for authors and publication criteria for the journal is a social process. These social processes are supported by communication media, and electronic media may facilitate or inhibit specific ways of organizing reviewers, reviewing and editing.The value of a socio-technical analysis can be illustrated by contrasting the design and functioning of two different electronic journals: the Electronic Transactions of Artificial Intelligence and The Electronic Journal of Cognitive and Brain Sciences. Superficially, these scientific electronic journals have much in common: each is hosted on a Web site, relies upon peer review to select high quality articles, and posts articles for public pre-review before they are accepted or rejected for formal publication. Both journals were established in 1997 and have had about 18 months of activity to establish a publishing pattern. These two journals are especially interesting in the ways that their designers envision attracting authors to submit high quality articles, and to insure that only high quality articles are actually published.However, one of these journals seems to be viable and one seems moribund. The technological publication system for each journal functions effectively, and I will indicate how the differences rest on their design as socio-technical systems. Rather than analyze the journals as I describe them, I believe that it would be useful for readers to note the contrasts in the two journals' designs, and to try to evaluate which journal is the more viable and why.Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (ETAI):The ECCAI (European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence) announced the ETAI as a journal in May 1997, with Professor Erik Sandewall, a pioneer of artificial intelligence research in Scandinavia, as its Editor-in-Chief. The journal�s editors and organizers sought to make the review process of articles more open for authors and readers, by making some aspects of an article�s review very public. ETAI�s editors claim:"The ETAI represents a novel approach to electronic publishing. We do not simply inherit the patterns from the older technology, but instead we have rethought the structure of scientific communication in order to make the best possible use of international computer networks as well as electronic document and database technologies."They describe their editorial process as follows:"Articles submitted to the ETAI are reviewed in a 2-phase process. After submission, an article is open to public online discussion in the area's News Journal [part of the journal�s Web site]. After the discussion period of three months, and after the authors have had a chance to revise it, the article is reviewed for acceptance by the ETAI, using confidential peer review and journal level quality criteria. This second phase is expected to be rather short because of the preceding discussion and possible revision. During the entire reviewing process, the article is already published in a "First Publication Archive", which compares to publication as a departmental tech report." (From ETAI, 1997; see Sandewall, 1998 for a more elaborate description of their editorial process.)The ETAI is divided into several topical sections, each section with its own section editor. The ETAI Web site has a public discussion section linked to each submitted article. An annual paper edition of the articles, without the discussion, is published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (KVA).The Electronic Journal of Cognitive and Brain Sciences (EJCBS)The EJCBS was devised by Dr. Zoltan Nadasdy of Rutgers University as an e-journal "that works without editors" and which offers the following features (Nadasdy, 1998a)5:"Instead of a hidebound peer-review system, we use an interactive "vote," in which those with comments and suggestions post them along with the article."Instead of a lengthy discussion carried out over a period of months and years as letters are submitted to journals and await publication, we allow anyone to post letters, and allow authors to answer them immediately."Instead of layout designers, we make use of...automated-formatting software that converts simple ASCII documents into HTML. The system supports graphical illustrations and automatically inserts them into the text. Hypertext is also inserted into the articles."Nadasdy sought to devise "an autonomous system" that could run on its own after it was programmed. It would rely upon readers to be referees, and not rely upon an editorial board. He designed it with the aim "that [it] would be able to control itself based on reasonable rules". He developed software to automatically create a Web page with graphics for each submitted article, so that no human editorial activity would be required to post articles."EJCBS uses a two-tier acceptance procedure that makes reviewing automatic and allows readers to control final acceptance: review status and archive status. Papers in review status are evaluated by the readers...a weight system controls the score given by different reader categories. The scores are transferred to a database that will be averaged at the end of a month, and the final status of the paper will be decided accordingly. Articles that receive a certain average score, or higher, are transferred to an archive of accepted papers. Those papers that do not receive the minimal average scores are rejected."Nadasdy designed EJCBS to improve the speed of publication, be low cost, enhance interactivity, and enable broad distribution. He claims that "those features are all integrated into the system I call "interactive publishing." The impact of interactive publishing could be enormous. It redefines concepts of traditional publishing, such as editing, acceptance, reviews and comments, and archives."The reviewing practices of EJCBS and ETAI differ considerably. EJCBS relies on anonymous reviewing by (self-selected) readers. They visit its Web site and rate an article on several seven-point scales to indicate their views of its quality and importance. Nadasdy hoped that EJCBS could "run itself" and has tried to automate key editorial processes. It is an extreme example of removing editorial attention and guidance from the publishing process and relying upon a readers� plebiscite.In contrast, an article that is submitted to ETAI, is a topic for public discussion by participants in the research community. During the three month open review period, questions and comments are signed. In an informal reading of the discussion about several articles, I found that only a few questions were typically posted. However, they reflected a deep understanding of the topics, and some were elaborate counter-examples or reformulations of the authors� positions. Authors' replies were also public, and seemed to engage the technical issues raised in the queries.Both ETAI and EJCBS were initiated in 1997. The ETAI accepted five articles for publication in 1997 while EJCBS posted two short articles in September 1997, but has not accepted any. The ETAI continues to receive a steady stream of submissions (eight articles in 1998) while the EJCBS does not6. The contrast between the ETAI and the EJCBS offers and interesting illustration of a (simplified) socio-technical systems analysis.