Hi guys! I am sharing my first writing project about comparing and contrast of 'Cell' journal between the version published in 1993 and 2010. Even the time has passed, there were a lot of similarities between in these eras, and also I could pick out several improvement on the volume published in 2010. Please feel free to comment if you have any thoughts about this article. Thanks! :)
'Cell’ is a well-known scientific journal
that includes a broad range of peer-reviewed research papers. Areas included are: Molecular biology, Cell and stem cell biology, Developmental biology, Microbiology, Immunology, Genetics and Genomics, cancer research, Virology, Physiology, Biophysics and Computational biology. The journal was established by Benjamin Lewin in 1974 and has been published biweekly
by ‘Cell Press,’ an imprint of Elsevier. In this paper, two ‘Cell’ journals which were published
in different eras will be analyzed in three parts: their features of book cover
design, including
their tables of contents and advertisement, their format (IMARD), images,
the structure of their journal articles, and their
sentence-level of passages. I will compare a recent version of ‘Cell’
from January, 1993
with another version from February, 2010.
Even though there is a 17 years gap
between the 1993
and the 2010 issues,
the design of the
book cover did not improve a lot. The 2010 version seems to have more creativity
in the front page to draw the attention of readers, while the previous version
displays the real image of the science itself. The total length of both
journals consisted of about 170 pages, and both have the same font size and ratio
of words to figures.
The table of contents and the list of the editorial
board had improved, with more detail compared to the past periodical. In the 1993 book menu,
there is a mini-review and a book review section, which describes more in
detail about two to three specific articles that relate to the main article,
and then talk about the main articles in the issue. However, in the 2010 table of contents, they
divide each column more specifically, so it is clearer how the topic makes sense by reading
the book in a regular sequence without going back and forth. For
example, they made new columns such as ‘Leading edge essay and
previews’ to
prepare people for the main topics to come. In
addition, all the
subtitles and images were
colored in the 2010
edition, making the readers focus more
on the book.
The 2010 edition also presents a significantly better quality of image.
Not only the color
but also the improvement of images might come from advanced science
techniques or lab instruments scientists have
developed lately.
Looking
at the quality of advertisement and editorial board, the recent version includes advertisements
for professional appliances and makes their products more interesting by
using metaphors, instead of listing out all the features and results of
their
products. Also, I could not find any common editorial members
between the two issues, which is understandable, seeing as the gap between
these two volumes is about 20 years.
Now, comparing these
two journals more in depth, I observed the format and graphics difference at first. Then,
I examined if
there was any change in style and particular sentence-level
features in each section of the research articles in the newer issue. Since
the articles are scientific research papers, the entire article uses clear IMRAD
format and ensures
that all the figures and tables of previous volume follow
analogous rules of
recent versions. For example, the articles of both eras put an arrow bar to point out
the features, and
they both use the same order and direction to mark figures. However, even
the structure looks
very similar; the recent version uses enhanced
figures and tables, and overall has better visuals than the old version.
Not
surprisingly, I could not find any metaphor, but there was much jargon related
to the topic in each article. On that count, these two science journals only focus
on specialists who have a background in their main topic, not on the
non-experts who do not have any background knowledge. Also, in both articles,
the sentences they use are hard to understand, with technical terms connected
with numbers and abbreviations.
In
conclusion, I suppose even there were seventeen years between the 1993 and 2010
volumes, the overall format, cover design and contents have not been changed
that much, although the journal have revised a few parts over the time. To get
a reader’s attention, both science journals use interesting cover designs with a
simple important point from the article. Within the same IMRAD format on the recent
version of journal, you can encounter colored high quality images with better
explanation of figures and tables, but essentially the articles in the old
volume and the ones in the recent journal all use same tactics to convey their
ideas.
References
Mai
Har Sham, Vesque C., Nonchev S., Marshall H., Frain M., Gupta R.D., Whiting J.,
Krumlauf R. The zinc finger gene Krox20 regulates HoxB2
(Hox2.8) during hindbrain segmentation (1993) Cell, 72 (2): pp. 183-196, doi: 10.1016/0092-8674(93)90659-E
MacKay,C., Declais, A.C., Lundin,C., Agostinho,A. Deans
AJ, Macartney TJ, Hofman K, Gartner A, West SC, Helleday T, Lilley DM, Ruse J (2010). Identification of KIAA1018/FAN1, a DNA repair nuclease recruited to DNA damage by monoubiquitinated FANCD2. Cell, 142(1):65-66, doi:10.1016/j.cell.2010.06.021.
