In the world of marketing and advertising the package—the choice of graphics, colors, the right title and so forth—has long been recognized to be equally important as the product itself. Scientists, however, are more naive, hoping to be judged only by the quality of their science. If market rules apply also to scientists, then those who ignore them may decrease their chances of survival in this Darwinistic arena.
For the most part, it is impossible to quantify the effect of the way scientific work is presented on its acceptability. Most of us do not have access to the material needed for such analysis, be it grant applications or papers submitted to journals. In the case of abstracts submitted to scientific meetings, most societies publish only those papers accepted for presentation, making comparison with non-accepted papers impossible.
But I think it's important to try to develop some comparisons, so recently I ...
