Customer Reviews

The Scientific Literature: A Guided Tour

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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.