The Scientific Literature: A Guided Tour [Paperback]

Joseph E. Harmon (Editor, Commentary), Alan G. Gross (Editor, Commentary)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0226316564 | ISBN-13: 978-0226316567 | Publication Date: May 15, 2007

The scientific article has been a hallmark of the career of every important western scientist since the seventeenth century. Yet its role in the history of science has not been fully explored. Joseph E. Harmon and Alan G. Gross remedy this oversight with The Scientific Literature, a collection of writings—excerpts from scientific articles, letters, memoirs, proceedings, transactions, and magazines—that illustrates the origin of the scientific article in 1665 and its evolution over the next three and a half centuries.

Featuring articles—as well as sixty tables and illustrations, tools vital to scientific communication—that represent the broad sweep of modern science, The Scientific Literature is a historical tour through both the rhetorical strategies that scientists employ to share their discoveries and the methods that scientists use to argue claims of new knowledge. Commentaries that explain each excerpt’s scientific and historical context and analyze its communication strategy accompany each entry.

A unique anthology, The Scientific Literature will allow both the scholar and the general reader to experience first hand the development of modern science.

(20070816)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"There are now many historical and sociological studies of scientific communication. Joseph Harmon and Alan Gross''s book, The Scientific Literature, is something different—neither a research monograph on the history of scientific writing nor a straightforward compilation of excerpts. . .  It includes about 125 examples of scientific writing taken from papers, books, reviews and Nobel speeches, and covers materials from the seventeenth century up to the announcement of the rough draft of the human genome in 2001....These scientific snippets are embedded in strands of editorial commentary describing, highlighting and interpreting. The tone is genial: the ''guided tour'' doesn''t threaten arduous intellectual adventure. Rhetorical terms are explained, scientific authors are identified, and pertinent scientific contexts are introduced."—Steven Shapin, Nature

(Steven Shapin Nature )

"Editors Harmon and Gross''s stated purpose is a ''guided tour'' of the scientific literature, illustrating its origins and evolution over the past 350 years. They do this with a short, most often no more than page-long, synopsis of an article, acoompanied by an explanation of why it was important in the evolution of scientific literature....A bibliography of more than 50 books that the editors recommend for science studies and extensive bibliographies for each of the nine chapters make this a valuable reference. Strongly recommended for lay readers interested in how today’s often intimidating scientific literature has its genesis.”—Choice

(Choice )

"For the scholar of rhetoric or communication (James Wynn Rhetoric Society Quarterly )

"This is an educational and entertaining read for scientists, teachers and students of scientific writing, and anyone intersted in scientific history and rhetoric. . . . The book also benefits from the writings of a stellar cast of great scientists whose original words . . . continue to awe and inspire."

(Susan M. Shirley Science Editor )

"In the introduction to this anthology, editors Joseph Harmon and Alan Gross describe the work as a sort of'' ''Michelin Guide'' to the development of the scientific article over the past four centuries. Their description is apt in that, like most guide books, The Scientific Literature offers highlights, interesting anecdotes, and recommendations rather than presenting its readers with much in the way of actual examples. (Alas, it does not offer a ratings system.) As befits a volume that grew out of an exhibition at the libraries of the University of Chicago, significant attention is devoted to such visual elements as tables, equations, and illustrations that have accompanied scientific texts since the scientific journal’s birth in the 17th century. Although the selections are somewhat idiosyncratic and the excerpts all too brief, the editors’ excellent sense of the telling detail make this volume a pleasure to dip into or to read from cover to cover."—Audra Wolfe, Chemical Heritage

(Audra Wolfe Chemical Heritage )

About the Author

Joseph E. Harmon is senior technical communicator at Argonne National Laboratory. Alan G. Gross is professor in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of Minnesota. Together, they coauthored Communicating Science: The Scientific Article from the 17th Century to the Present.

Product Details

• Paperback: 312 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press (May 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226316564
• ISBN-13: 978-0226316567
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,836,569 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hors d'oeuvres to study of scientific rhetoric, November 8, 2008

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A. J. Sutter (Tokyo, Japan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Scientific Literature: A Guided Tour (Paperback)

Many thousands of scientific articles are published every year, yet they remain opaque to the general reader and even to scientists who aren't specialists in the pertinent field. This book offers a stimulating collection of glimpses of scientific papers, with an eye to illuminating features of their literary and argumentative style.

The sixty papers cover a wide range of disciplines, as well as roughly three centuries of history. For each, the editors provide commentary on historical context and stylistic techniques, which is usually quite interesting. I thought the most successful part of the book was Chapter 6, which first describes the usual organization of a scientific article and the purposes of each organizational section (e.g., the purpose of an introduction is to create a "research space," @ 193), and then applies this analysis to a relatively recent (2001) Nature paper in quantum optics. Another highlight was Chapter 7, which not only has a good discussion of the linguistic norms of scientific writing but also some entertaining examples of scientists' trying to lighten things up a little. (My favorite, though, is non-lingusitc: a joke buried in a diagram from a 1955 JACS paper by Melvin Calvin, which nonetheless led to a Nobel Prize, @ 230).

However, the book is also frustrating in a number of respects. The biggest frustration is that the excerpts from the actual papers (or translations thereof) make up a relatively small fraction of the book. In most cases, you get to read only a page or so from the paper -- and sometimes only one or two paragraphs. Most illustrations are rather murkily reproduced, even for the pre-modern papers that are included *because* of their illustrations; an gloss-paper insert of plates would have helped. And sometimes the editors ignore their own advice, "Brevity is not always a blessing" (@241): e.g., we're told that the final paper in the book, on the sequncing of the human genome, ends with a literary echo of Watson & Crick's landmark paper on the DNA double helix, but we never hear what exactly Watson and Crick wrote.

Chapter 5's discussion of "Equations, Tables and Figures" was especially weak on the topic of equations. For example, the short discussion of Feynman diagrams would have been well-complemented by a peek at Julian Schwinger's formulation of the same theory (quantum electrodynamics), which the authors mention only in passing (@171). Schwinger relied on relatively few words and a multitude of monstrous equations that must have taxed the typographical ingenuity of the folks at the Physical Review in the 1940s and 1950s (see, e.g., the Dover reprint volume of QED papers that Schwinger edited). It would have been interesting to learn how an equation-heavy style like his evolved -- was it original with him, or were there forerunners?

Not surprisingly, the book's breadth does impair its depth. Again, the Feynman diagrams are a case in point. The editors say that the "communicative utility [of the diagrams] is without question" -- but this glosses over the fact that *what* they communicate never was universally agreed on. David Kaiser wrote an excellent book on this subject, "Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics" (2005), and had also published some papers on the topic during the several years before his book came out. But the biliography omits mentioning any of these. Similarly, the discussion of Edwin Hubble's discovery of a regularity in galaxies' red shifts claims that Hubble always resisted the notion of an expanding universe; but the editors neither offer any support for this claim nor any reference to any biography of Hubble. I can only imagine that there are lots of similar issues with other papers. It's understandable that the authors would have to simplify their discussion of the context for so many varied papers, and the bibliography they do provide is quite extensive. But it's disappointing to realize that the bibliography is still quite incomplete for someone who wants to discover the nuances behind some of the editors' blanket statements.

I read this book in a relatively short time, over the course of a couple of afternoons, and in consecutive order. I suspect that stretching out your reading of this book, or just dipping into it randomly, runs the risk of making it too fragmented to sustain your interest. With rare exceptions, such as Chapter 6, the book is short on over-arching themes, so the best way to form a coherent impression is to ingest it in big chunks. On that basis, it can be a stimulating introduction to the rhetoric of science, but more like eating a multitude of finger foods than a substantial meal.