The way we write

Abstract

Ever since the 1950s, when research and engineering in the USA and, to a lesser extent, in the UK, started to expand dramatically, English has been the lingua franca of the scientific community (Garfield, 1998). As a consequence, many scientists all over the world are now obliged to describe their research and discuss their results in a language that is not their mother tongue. This clearly affects the communication of science in the worldwide academic community, because the way a researcher writes in English depends largely on his or her familiarity with the language. For the sake of communicating science, the scientific community has to allow certain unavoidable differences in style, provided they are within the bounds of English grammar. But a scientist is not expected to be either a professional writer or a translator. Furthermore, there is no standard scientific English against which to compare a text, so it is difficult to evaluate the style of a scientific publication. In fact, there is not even a standard for the English language itself, as various countries, such as Canada, the Caribbean, India, the Philippines, New Zealand and the USA, have developed varieties of English that are as distinct from British English as they are from each other (Ritter, 2002). > …there is no standard scientific English against which to compare a text, so it is difficult to evaluate the style of a scientific publication Although it is not possible to define a common standard for written English in scientific communication, it is valuable to identify local peculiarities and differences in writing from authors from various countries. These clearly prevail in some journals more than others, depending on the level of copy‐editing of the final text by editors and publishers. Such variations in the use of English, due to the authors' …