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Book Review: Structural and Functional Aspects of Lipoproteins in Living Systems

Units, Symbols and Abbreviations: A Guide for Biological and Medical Editors and Authors. G. ELLIS (Ed.). The Royal Society 0/ Medicine, London, 1971, Pp, 36, 54p including postage. This little booklet sets out the recommendations of a working party of medical editors on the units, symbols, abbreviations and conventions to be used in journals, together with a method for citing references. It includes lists of SI units, with their symbols and definitions, prefixes for decimal fractions and multiples, special names for units and a summary of those which will eventually fall into disuse. A comprehensive range of abbreviations for medical terms, ranging from a.f.b. to w.b.c., is also included. The logic of the SI system ofunits is acknowledged, but the working party has retained many familiar and often synonymous units which will become redundant. Thus absorbance, extinction and optical density are all included, each with its recommended symbol. Where guidance is offered in the selection of alternative units, it is somewhat conservative. Thus SI units are pre/erred (i.e. not obligatory) to the Angstrom, bar and equivalent, and authors are recommended to avoid (instead of not use) billion, degree Fahrenheit, grain, hundredweight and lambda. Such a compromise may be inevitable, on the grounds that familiar units cannot be scrapped overnight in favour of unfamiliar but more rational ones, but it should be recognised as temporary. The recommendation that pressure should be recorded in mmHg 'only when conventional and the measurement has been made with a mercury manometer' leads to difficulties when the mercury manometer is not used as, for example, with Peol measurements made by the Astrup technique. If measurements are to be 'quoted in the units in which the measure is made', confusion can only be avoided by making all these measurements in SI units. It is a pity that this aim is not more clearly recognised. Standardisation in the layout of references is urgently required and the recommended convention is based on 'the usage in the majority of 20 widely quoted biological and medical journals'. It is clearly a personal choice and the reasons given for it are not very persuasive. The booklet is well written and provides a list of recommended practices which should be invaluable to all British authors and editors. It is a step in the right direction and it is hoped that before long the next edition will take a further step. The introduction comments that some editors may disagree with some of the recommendations and although 'editors may not adopt them all, perhaps authors will'. Nevertheless, the editors' decision is the final one. P. M. G. Broughton