Reviewing a practical guide or software manual
A practical guide or software manual teaches a task, so a review of one judges what each chapter does for the reader, how well the book is organised for the reader it targets, what it is worth against its price and other sources of help, and how long its advice will hold.
The reader the book is written for
Mitchell Katz's Study Design and Statistical Analysis: A Practical Guide for Clinicians (Cambridge University Press, 2006) was reviewed by a writer who now teaches how to interpret and report statistics and who, as a developing medical writer, had spent considerable time learning what he wanted to know about biostatistics without drowning in what he did not. When it was reviewed, its author was a clinical professor of medicine, epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, director of the San Francisco Department of Public Health and an attending physician at San Francisco General Hospital. The reviewer judged him well qualified to write the book, clearly knowledgeable about the topic from personal experience and obviously comfortable writing about it. Although the subtitle names clinicians as its target audience, the reviewer held that the book should be valuable for anyone who wants an introduction to clinical research, in particular university students and professionals in health and clinical medicine who need to understand the medical literature or are considering careers in clinical research. He judged the author's keen sense of audience by itself an endorsement of the book, and recommended it highly to those looking for an introduction to clinical research and statistical analysis.
Philippa Benson and Susan Silver's What Editors Want advises on preparing scientific papers for publication, where other guides focus on how to write them. Its authors identify their target readers as writers, senior researchers and teachers of science writing, native and non-native speakers of English alike, but its reviewer argued that people taking their first steps into science writing will benefit most, and that for them it is almost obligatory reading.
Hilary J. M. Topper's Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Social Media, but were afraid to ask… (2009; 172 pages) draws on its author's nearly 30 years in public relations, advertising and marketing to give simple instructions on how to begin using social media to promote a business. Its reviewer judged it a book for beginners: anyone already adept at sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook probably will not find it useful, while for social media novices it is a good place to start.
Laura Poole's Juggling on a High Wire: The Art of Work-Life Balance When You're Self-Employed (2015; 98 pages, $11.75) has chapters on working from home, balancing family and other commitments, preparedness for work emergencies, and coping with being under- and overworked. Vignettes from other experienced freelancers give readers tips of the trade. Its reviewer found the book intended for all freelances: beginners can learn practical approaches to crafting a work-life balance, and seasoned ones can be reminded to practise them.
Janet Roseman's The Way of the Woman Writer, a guide for women writing autobiographical pieces, was judged by its reviewer a well-organised workshop in a book. Each of its chapters focuses on a spiritual topic, and nearly all of its exercises are rooted in visualisation. The book awakens the creative spirit, in the reviewer's judgement, but those needing more guidance on composing a well-structured piece will have to look elsewhere, and many of its exercises may be overly meditative for authors quite accustomed to technical writing. The reviewer's example of such exercises is the chapter on developing personal power shields.
What the chapters cover
The 12 chapters of Katz's statistics primer are organised chronologically, around the steps in planning, conducting, interpreting and publishing clinical research. Most run 13 or 14 pages, while the chapters on research designs and on bivariate analysis run to 30 and 54, a length the reviewer found did not detract from the flow of the book. In his judgement the chapter on choosing a research question and a study design does a nice job of explaining what makes a good research question and why it needs an appropriate design, and nicely summarises error, confounding and bias. Data management is often left unaddressed in introductory books on statistics, and the chapter on it offers sound advice that reflects the author's hands-on expertise in conducting research. The three analysis chapters take readers through simple worked examples of chi-square analyses, risk and odds ratios, hypothesis testing, analysis of variance, correlation, simple linear regression and time-to-event analysis. Giving sample-size calculation a chapter of its own, the reviewer held, appropriately emphasises this important, if neglected, aspect of study design. The concepts of the chapter on diagnostic tests and prognostic studies are by nature difficult to understand in the short term, and the reviewer attributed any difficulty readers meet there to the concepts rather than to the text, which, as in the rest of the book, gives clear explanations and illustrative examples. The chapter on writing and publishing a scientific article, covering authorship, journal selection, rejection and even dealing with the media, is an appealing part of the book. The book closes with a list of the steps to follow in planning and conducting clinical research, and its index is adequate.
The reviewer's only criticism is of the analysis chapters, which carry intimidating titles and are organised in the conventional way, nearly universal in the field, from the perspective of the field of statistics rather than from that of an audience unfamiliar with it. Even so, readers who push through their fear will find these chapters readily understandable and, the reviewer thought, will be able to appreciate the underlying elegance of statistics.
The first chapter of What Editors Want rightly highlights the lack of formal training in preparing manuscripts for publication, the second invites the reader to get inside the journal editor's mind, and the third guides the reader in judging whether their research is ready for publication and in what format. The chapter on authorship gives handy tips, such as agreeing on authorship and author order early to avoid conflict, and discusses language assistance for non-native speakers and controversial topics such as guest authorship. Surprisingly, it neglects to mention the ICMJE guidelines on authorship despite mentioning the ICMJE elsewhere, and its advice seems to reflect how authorship is often assigned in practice, which the reviewer called incorrect. The chapter on preparing for manuscript submission covers the bread and butter of manuscript preparation, and is great for the novice but less useful for the more experienced writer. The closing chapter, on trends in scientific publishing, is in the reviewer's judgement a less than illuminating look into the future and vaguer than the rest of the book. A sidebar in it, in which the chief executive of an app-development company discusses the potential of apps in scientific publishing, reads like an advertisement. Each of the other chapters carries one or more such contributions from interested parties, journal editors and publishers among them, which give useful insights but are also the source of some unnecessary repetition.
In attempting to cover everything, the authors of What Editors Want leave themselves too little room to treat some topics thoroughly: copyright and permissions, for example, get a reasonable amount of general information but not enough detail to be of practical use. The reviewer asked what there is to stop the reader doing some follow-up research. He called the book an absolute goldmine of information on relevant resources: its five appendices provide, among other things, links to online resources for improving science writing, a list of textbooks on writing, editing and publishing, a list of databases offering free access to scientific articles or abstracts, a pre-submission checklist, and links to websites offering free or cheap photographic images.
Topper's book is a quick read, written in a conversational, first-person voice. Five introductory chapters define common social networking terms; 21 chapters each review one site, with instructions for signing up, tips for personalising the profile, a list of the site's differentiating features and applications, and the author's own opinion of its benefits and usefulness; and five closing chapters touch on use by non-profit organisations, dealing with bad media, going viral and emerging trends. The reviewer enjoyed most the reviews of some less familiar sites and the author's personal take on each.
Peter Aitken and Maxine Okazaki's Microsoft Word 2010 for Medical and Technical Writers succeeds the authors' similarly purposed book on Word 2003. To one of its reviewers, the book's primary utility is that of a travel guide through a labyrinthine program, saving users from time-consuming trial-and-error discoveries or from remaining oblivious to its labour-saving features, and the features it covers are treated in adequate, albeit variable, depth. Revelations and advice abound, with the more arcane material presented in boxouts between the expository and instructional passages, and the guidebook is highly useful, though admittedly not comprehensive. This reviewer uses only Macs, while the book focuses on the PC version of the program, though the differences between the two may be slight. He did not spend time specifically checking the accuracy of its directions, and most of those he used worked on his Macs with minimal adjustment and many with none at all. The book occasionally seems to straddle the line between introductory and advanced manuals, as most technical documents intended for advanced users do, and a concept elementary to one reader may be considered complex and arcane by a less experienced one.
A second reviewer of the manual knew of no Word manual or technical resource before its first edition that specifically addressed the tasks of developing long and complex technical documents. At 200 pages the manual makes no claim or attempt to be comprehensive, and medical writers who take the program seriously will have their own views on what could have been left out or included. In her view, some elementary aspects of word processing, such as text wrapping, which anyone employed as a medical writer knows about, could have been eliminated; the section on creating and managing a table of contents is overly long at 15 pages, while working with tracked changes gets only 4 and does not cover generating a comparison file; and outline view, an extremely useful and underused feature, is barely mentioned.
How the book is organised and presented
Michelle L. Kienholz and Jeremy M. Berg's How the NIH Can Help You Get Funded: An Insider's Guide to Grant Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2014; 188 pages, $29.95) begins with the candid assertion that the National Institutes of Health, with more than 20 separate institutes and a multitude of specialised offices, can be byzantine. Its reviewer found its puzzling organisation its weakest point. The first few chapters delve into the structure of the agency, which has the effect of burying the lede. The reviewer asked why the book tells readers about a principal investigator's online account with the agency on page 46 when the account is not defined until page 68; why it explains the mechanics of a grant review panel and how to get onto one when less-experienced investigators still do not understand how to write for that audience, the subject of chapters 8 and 9; why it says that a grant application's project summary is not a throw-away 30 lines of text without ever saying that the summary is limited to 30 lines; and why it discusses the federal budget process, over which an applicant has little control, in chapter 5, before discussing in chapter 10 how to talk to people inside the agency who could help.
The reviewer's biggest source of confusion was whom the authors believed their audience to be, since the information, its organisation and its degree of detail, plentiful in some places and absent in others, suggest different audiences at different times. Seasoned grant writers will appreciate the nuggets tucked away in the book, while less-savvy ones will get lost in the welter of details and miss them altogether. A brief introduction sets out 15 key concepts, each linked to a chapter, so that readers can browse by their needs and interests.
The title struck the reviewer for two reasons: it was the first she had heard that the agency could help her, and neither author was an insider, one being a former director of one of the agency's institutes who no longer worked there and the other a grant writer and editor who helps researchers develop applications. She saw her confusion about the audience reflected in the title, since few readers will think the agency exists to help them get money rather than to improve public health through research. A more accurate title, the reviewer proposed, would have been How Knowing More About the NIH Will Help Your Grant's Chances of Funding. The four-page list of abbreviations jumbles together grant mechanisms, institutes, offices and miscellaneous terms. The reviewer declined to blame the authors for the existence of the abbreviations and asked instead who the list is for, since seasoned investigators will not need it, new ones will find it overwhelming, and the terms are spelled out in the text later anyway.
The Word manual's spiral binding and soft cover make it easy to use, and its font size and white space allow concepts to stand out, though its first reviewer would have preferred a serif typeface and a ragged right margin, features widely considered to enhance readability, at least in print. Most ingratiating, in his view, is the authors' intimate and collegial tone, in which their advice is heard as if from a trusted friend recounting lessons learned. Its second reviewer praised large-format pages with eminently readable type, a clearly rendered heading structure, spiral binding, and the authors' personal tone, which makes reading the book seem like a workday conversation with a couple of seasoned medical-writing colleagues.
Price and other sources of help
Its first reviewer had no doubt that anyone who uses Word for work will quickly recoup the price of even the printed version of Aitken and Okazaki's manual, and that engaging an IT technician for a one-to-one consultation would cost more. He held that harried users will keep needing such help, since craftily timed, incremental releases of new and improved versions boost profit margins, and no future version of the program will be free of bugs or complexity. Its second reviewer, who had led chapter programmes on using the program since 2005, found that Word users will find in the book a good explanation of at least one feature that has baffled them, and that any single section could justify the purchase price by itself. Even the paper book, at $44.95 and more expensive than the electronic formats, would cost roughly the same as a single technical-support session, and the version she recommended is the PDF, at $9.99.
Its reviewer's verdict on What Editors Want was that as an introduction to scientific publishing it cannot be faulted, and that it is less essential for readers who need no such introduction, but it still contains more than enough useful information to merit its bargain £13 price.
Katz's statistics primer is primarily an overview of research, but it might also be used as a guide to planning research. Its author does not explicitly recommend that new investigators consult a statistician before beginning their research, but the reviewer believed that he did not intend the book to be their only guide to research, and that it should help them ask statisticians the right questions and put the answers into perspective. The reviewer's summary was that the book does what its author intended with great skill and grace, and is reasonably priced.
The reviewer of the NIH guide held that brevity does not make a guide to grant writing suboptimal, her favourite running to only 100 pages. Tastes and needs differ, though, so in her advice readers should do some homework into the best guides and choose by their own background and needs.
How long the advice holds
The introduction to the NIH guide's 20-page appendix of web addresses points readers to a co-author's blog for updated links and information, which deftly addresses the top problem in writing a how-to book about grant applications: the timeliness of information, especially online information.
In 2010, when Topper's book was reviewed, thousands of social networking sites existed, with new ones emerging almost daily, so deciding which to review was probably a challenge. The reviewer would have liked to know more about how the sites were selected, since certain sites she finds useful are not mentioned. She found the title a bit of a misnomer, because in the constantly changing world of social media no single book can teach readers everything they need to know.
Despite being relatively short, Katz's statistics primer will in the reviewer's view serve as a reference for some time to come, because the underlying principles of clinical research and statistical analysis are not likely to change markedly in the next several years.
What the book changed in the reviewer's practice
Laurie Lewis's What to Charge: Pricing Strategies for Freelancers and Consultants (2nd edition, 2011; 186 pages) was reviewed by a freelance who admitted to being a little vague about numbers, with a peculiar amnesia about how much time she spends on any activity, and who after reading the book understood that this ignorance was costing her money when bidding for work on a project basis. Before reading it, she had estimated and bid a training customisation at 3 hours that actually took 13, and could not charge for the 10 extra hours. Keeping detailed task logs had always seemed compulsive to her, and the book made her a convert.
She found that the book can help three audiences: new freelances get a glimpse of a rational method of setting rates and negotiating, experienced ones learn the value of keeping detailed task logs, and employees learn how and why to keep a task log that can justify time estimates that management may be underestimating, along with negotiating tips and tactics for their next raise or job negotiation. A colleague who had written and edited medical research articles for more than 40 years met many unanticipated hurdles when he recently began to set up a for-profit editing service, and found that the book gave him sound advice on several issues, with clarity and directness. He singled out as particularly useful its figures illustrating records of income and expenses, time expenditure and sample contracts.