Q&A: Carl Zimmer on writing popular-science books

Reviews of popular science books.

Do you read popular neuroscience? Do you think Oliver Sacks is spot on and use his books to engage students or do you reckon his patient reports are more like novels or science fiction? Are you taken by Antonio Damasio’s powerful arguments or do you think he did not get his philosophy exactly right? Do you enjoy the writings of William Calvin, Susan Greenfield, Vilayanur Ramachandran or do you ...

Citations in Popular and Interpretive Science Writing.

Why is it that so much otherwise excellent “popularized” science writing lacks an essential ingredient, a lack that minimizes its lasting value? I have found that scientific publications can be qualitatively evaluated into those which include bibliographic citation data and those which do not. Scientists frequently are stimulated to order publications cited in articles. Is the exclusion of cita...

Ten simple rules for writing a popular science book

Scientists have a long history of writing for a general audience [1]. By communicating ideas and discoveries to the wider public, popular science books can generate debate, influence culture, and inspire future researchers. They can also provide new skills and opportunities, and in some cases a second career, for their authors [2]. Writing scientific papers is a central part of academic life, b...

Between fact and fiction: demarcating science from non-science in popular physics books

This paper looks at the ways in which popular science books, through their explicit insertion of science into the public domain, act to reinforce a distinct demarcation between scientists and their publics. It is argued that these books acquire a distributed media presence by acting as nodal points in an intertextual web. The intertextuality of popular science books causes images of science whi...

"popular" Science.