Kathy Redmond wrote an editorial in the November issue of Nature Clinical Practice Oncology about the media coverage of cancer. She argues that this coverage is frequently of poor quality, reinforcing the myth of cancer as an automatic death sentence and the overemphasis on stories about wonder cures.

Uwe Hossfeld and Lennart Olsson have just added a story from a dark time in German science to the History of Nature website. This article extends an earlier report from September 2006 that uncovered the story of how Nature was banned in Germany in November 1937. The arguments used by the German science minister Bernhard Rust at the time are not worth repeating – they are ideological rather than scientific arguments.

We just had a very interesting discussion in the Ask the Nature Editor Forum about scientific writing. Most people agreed that the quality of the writing in the end doesn't really influence the decision to accept or reject a paper. But good writing, especially in the first paragraph, certainly helps. But what is good scientific writing? Two weeks ago I suggested a few good books on the subject in a blog post.

I recently wrote about the potential of Google Docs and Zoho Writer als online writing tools for scientists. Buzzword is another web-based writing tool and last week was opened for new users. Buzzword is different, because it is based on Adobe Flash, which makes for a much nicer user interface. As expected, Buzzword doesn't handle references as flexible as Microsoft Word.

Last week I wrote about web-based writing tools. I believe that these tools are almost there and someone has to put the pieces together to make them work for writing a scientific paper. EJ Press System by EJournal Press, Manuscript Central by ScholarOne and Editiorial Manager by Aries Systems are among the most popular web-based online submission systems.

Google Docs and Zoho Writer are web-based writing tools that have gained many of the features of traditional word processors such as Microsoft Word. Looking at Google Docs as an example (Zoho Writer shares many of the strenghts and weaknesses), I wanted to find out if they are mature enough to write a scientific paper. The Good The major strength is collaboration.

The Hirsch number tries to quantify the (scientific) productivity of a scientist. The Hirsch number was first described by the physicist J.E. Hirsch in a 2005 PNAS paper: An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output.