Tuesday, February 10, 2015

punctuation - Should I use adjacent parentheses or a semicolon (or something else)?



In scientific writing it is common to use parentheses to refer to the details of statistical analyses at the end of a sentence. However, it is also common to refer to figures or tables this way. Often I find that the same sentence requires both a reference to statistical details and a figure (example below). Should I use adjacent parenthetical references or separate the statistical information from the figure reference with a semicolon?




Treatment A contained significantly greater mass than treatment B (p = 0.001)(Figure 1).





OR




Treatment A contained significantly greater mass than treatment B (p = 0.001; Figure 1).



Answer



Don't write pairs of parentheses back to back (don't do it)(no, really!). Either you can put on of the two items in the main text:





Treatment A contained significantly greater mass than treatment B (p = 0.001), as show on Figure 1.




or use the semicolon, as you proposed:




Treatment A contained significantly greater mass than treatment B (p = 0.001; Figure 1).



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