4. Compare and contrast of 'Cell' journal between 1993 and 2010.

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.