Personalizing science—who did what when?

Scholarly writing has traditionally been presented in a conservative and perhaps indirect style, with the passive voice predominating. Many years ago, as a young scientist and author, I was impressed by the following passage: “I herewith ask all your scientists to renounce the false modesty of previous generations of scientists. Do not be afraid to name the agent of the action in a sentence, even when it is ‘I’ or ‘we’. Once you get into the habit of saying ‘I found’, you will also find that you have a tendency to write ‘S. aureus produced lactate’ rather than ‘lactate was produced by S. aureus.’” ¹ (quoted from the 1st edition of the book, now in its 9th edition, ² which I commend to readers and authors).

As a gatekeeper of science and an agent of readers, I edit to our Journal style, which is to personalize science, give credit where it is due, and improve readability. Especially in multi-center studies, it is important to be clear about who did what when. The use of “this,” as in “this study” can be ambiguous. Are the authors referring to their present report, or to the study in the just-cited reference? Why not specify “our study”? If you conducted 2 related studies, then refer to them by date. Names are not usually included in text but, for clarity, they may be needed to identify which author conducted which component of the study (e.g., the pathologists who read the slides).

Following the entreaty above to use the active voice and to personalize, I also edit to avoid anthropomorphization. Studies do not find anything; authors or researchers do. Reports, studies, findings, or tables are not animate entities, and they cannot analyze, show, demonstrate, or reveal results. More correctly, the author(s) took these actions: “We analyzed . . .”, “We found . . .”, etc. (Table 1).

Table 1.

Recent examples of statements that I personalized or converted to the active voice.

Original	Edited
The aim of this study was to investigate	We investigated
In this report, we describe	We describe here
In this retrospective study, the data were collected	We collected data
A total of 28 samples were tested	We tested 28 samples
Known positive and negative samples were used in this study	We used known positive and negative samples
The sensitivity and specificity of the assay were also evaluated	We evaluated the sensitivity and specificity of our assay
The developed assay	Our assay
The study analyzed the data	We analyzed the data
Table 1 shows that samples were positive.	Samples were positive (Table 1).
Test results did not show a significant difference (p > 0.05)	Results were not significantly different (p > 0.05)
The results of this report demonstrated that	We found

Who might feel uncomfortable with the JVDI personalization style? Possibly gift and guest authors (e.g., senior staff who have added, or who have had added, their names automatically to author lists without actually being involved directly in the study). The JVDI Instructions for authors (https://journals.sagepub.com/author-instructions/VDI) are clear regarding authorship versus acknowledgment: “. . . Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content.. . . Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group alone does not constitute authorship, although all contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in the Acknowledgments section.”

We also often deal with claims of primacy, as in “first reports.” Although authors may believe that theirs is the first report of a finding, it may have been reported elsewhere in an obscure site, and we prefer to let history decide. Rather than: “This is the first report of disease X in …., to the best of our knowledge”, I edit to: “Disease X has not been reported previously in …., to our knowledge.” Then, as pointed out recently by one of our reviewers, “to our knowledge” requires substantiation. This statement may be brief in the Abstract but must be expanded further in the text (e.g., “We found no cases of disease X in a search of Google, PubMed, CAB Direct, Web of Science, and Scopus, using the search terms ‘. . ..’, suggesting that no descriptions of this condition have been reported in [species].”). Although it may be gratifying to be the first to publish a finding, it can equally be embarrassing when this claim is disputed in a letter to the editor.

As a SAGE publication, JVDI has access to the iThenticate program to screen manuscripts for plagiarism, and hence the correct attribution of statements. However, manuscript evaluation is becoming even more challenging in the age of artificial intelligence; with ever-more-evolved chatbots, such as ChatGPT, it may be increasingly difficult to determine authorship and hence personalization—who did what when, and who takes responsibility for this report? SAGE has a policy online concerning chatbots, including recommendations from the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME; https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/chatgpt-and-generative-ai), which may be of interest to authors and readers. JVDI has adopted recommendations from WAME (Chatbots, ChatGPT, and Scholarly Manuscripts—WAME Recommendations on ChatGPT and Chatbots in Relation to Scholarly Publications, https://wame.org/page3.php?id=106), namely:

1. Chatbots cannot be authors.

2. Authors should be transparent when chatbots are used and provide information about how they were used.

3. Authors are responsible for the work performed by a chatbot in their manuscript (including the accuracy of what is presented, and the absence of plagiarism) and for appropriate attribution of all sources (including for material produced by the chatbot).

The JVDI Instructions for authors will be updated shortly and will no doubt continue to evolve to keep pace with technology.

Grant Maxie
JVDI Editor-in-chief
gmaxie@uoguelph.ca