We cannot ask the Romans because they did use not the words “datum” or “data” as we do in science. Therefore, academic medicine, alone among all the sciences, has stuck firm to the requirement for the plural form of “data.” Curiously, the term “datum” is almost never used and appears to be replaced by compound nouns, such as “data point.” So, is the word “data” singular or plural, and does it matter? However, a similar search of PubMed shows the plural form in academic medicine to have remained at 3 times the use of the singular form. A search of Google Books shows that the use of plural form of “data,” which once outnumbered the singular form by a factor of 4, has been reduced to equality in the last 2 decades. Other branches of science, such as computing and engineering, have abandoned use of “data” as a plural noun. Journalists use only the singular form, regardless of whether their reports are written or spoken. In ordinary speech where use of the plural form of data can be cumbersome and pompous, the singular noun is much more acceptable. The justification cited in medicine is that the word “data,” the Latin plural of “datum,” refers to multiple facts or observations. Hopefully not in CJS.Īcceptance of the singular form of the word “data” has increased in all fields except academic medicine. I suspect that failure to use “data” as a plural noun has, on occasion, resulted in dismissal of an otherwise acceptable manuscript. Use of the term “data” as a singular noun is often seen as a marker of either scientific naïveté or poor writing. For some manuscripts, the description “poorly written” weighs heavily in the mind of the reviewer. The editor’s job is to divine if the reasons for the opinion are valid. It is clear to editors that some reviewers’ judgments are guided by whether they just liked a manuscript or not. Safeguards, such as using multiple independent reviewers, review templates and conflict of interest guidelines, try to make the process fair. Selection of manuscripts for publication in a scientific journal is a subjective process.
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