Search results for ""Author Stuart West""

Writing scientific publications is a fundamental step in the research process. Furthermore, as science becomes more interdisciplinary and the number of journals continues to expand, individual papers increasingly need to stand out to be read and have any form of impact. It is widely assumed that students and early career scientists will simply acquire the necessary expertise. However, this could not be further from the truth - many early career scientists find writing both intimidating and overwhelming; writing is a skill that needs to be learnt and actively developed. This novel book's fundamental principle is simple - the reader must come first. The purpose of a scientific paper is to pass on knowledge, and so impactful writing must focus on attracting, holding, and illuminating readers. The authors demonstrate how just a few simple pointers can significantly improve both writing quality and impact. They tackle each component of a paper in turn, providing a simple framework that makes clear what needs to be included (and what doesn't!), and in what order. They also provide advice for writing up different types of science, from laboratory experiments to theoretical modelling. The focus throughout is on the need to use simple, jargon-free English, and to assume that the reader has little or no prior knowledge. In summary, the book is about writing better scientific papers that are more likely to be read and have impact. Scientific Papers Made Easy is targeted at a broad audience of students and professionals, across the biological, life, and human sciences. It uses simple biological and human examples that assume no prior knowledge and will resonate with any scientist.

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Recent decades have witnessed an explosion of theoretical and empirical studies of sex allocation, transforming how we understand the allocation of resources to male and female reproduction in vertebrates, invertebrates, protozoa, and plants. In this landmark book, Stuart West synthesizes the vast literature on sex allocation, providing the conceptual framework the field has been lacking and demonstrating how sex-allocation studies can shed light on broader questions in evolutionary and behavioral biology. West clarifies fundamental misconceptions in the application of theory to empirical data. He examines the field's successes and failures, and describes the research areas where much important work is yet to be done. West reveals how a shared underlying theoretical framework unites findings of sex-ratio variation across a huge range of life forms, from malarial parasites and hermaphroditic worms to sex-changing fish and mammals. He shows how research on sex allocation has been central to many critical questions and controversies in evolutionary and behavioral biology, and he argues that sex-allocation research serves as a key testing ground for different theoretical approaches and can help resolve debates about social evolution, parent-offspring conflict, genomic conflict, and levels of selection. Certain to become the defining book on the subject for the next generation of researchers, Sex Allocation explains why the study of sex allocation provides an ideal model system for advancing our understanding of the constraints on adaptation among all living things in the natural world.

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