Nature’s exemplary summary paragraph

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• November 23, 2015
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Every time we write a manuscript for a bold abstract journal the broad readership question is asked. Will they understand? Journals like Nature encourage you to think that way. To help their authors’ out in this endeavour, Nature supplies an exemplary summary paragraph, which is that bold, fully-referenced oddity that replaces the abstract in a Letter to Nature. This summary paragraph, we are told, should start with “One or two sentences providing a basic introduction to the field, comprehensible to a scientist in any discipline.” And this is their first sentence:

During cell division, mitotic spindles are assembled by microtubule-based motor proteins.

And here’s us, more than a century after the dawn of quantum theory, agonising over whether the broad readership will understand what quantum correlations are.