What we read |
| Each month I receive approximately 200 e-mails alerting me to the contents of newly published issues of scientific journals. In fact, much more than this is published every month (many journals appear weekly), but I restrict my reading ambition to high-impact journals addressing a multidisciplinary audience, or dealing with subjects at the very heart of my scientific interests. |
| More than 200 tables of contents, vividly screened by my eyes for key-words exciting my unabating interest, month by month. Each of these tables announces the birth of countless new articles requesting my gracious attention. This attention inevitably meets with neuro-cognitive limits, best illustrated by a little lesson in elementary calculus. |
| Some journal issues contain more than 100 articles, others less than 10; let's assume a mean number of 30. Some articles consist of more than 20 pages, others of less than 4; lets assume a mean number of 8. If we multiply these estimates with each other, we obtain 200 x 30 x 8 pages to read each month (my pocket calculator returns the number 48.000, but this must be wrong). |
| 48.000 pages! Waiting to be read! Each month! Wow... How much time do I have to read all this? It may be expected, that I'm sitting infront of my computer 5 days a week, thus roughly 20 days a month, with at the very best 8 h reading time each day. If I divide 48.000 by 20 and by 8 (pocket calculator...), I end up with 300 pages per hour, or 5 pages per minute. |
| And here we have the neuro-cognitive limits mentioned above: nobody is able (1) to read 5 pages per minute, and (2) not even to read all day long with full concentration (it may occur sometimes, but not with scientific literature). And (3) you may have guessed it: scientists have more to do than just to read all day long. How do we deal with this problem? Each scientist may have his own strategy. |
| The first solution to the problem is simply not to read. I remember a meeting near Padua in 1990, a few years after the discovery of the metabotropic glutamate receptor (this is a really important one). After a lecture on metabotropic actions of glutamate, Fritz Sladeczek (the first author of the seminal Nature paper) raised his hand and pointed out that they had seen quite similar things. The speaker apologized for not having seen the paper. |
| Another solution is to read superficially. Many readers (including myself) only read a few words into the headline of an article and quickly decide to switch to the next. This may happen with several articles in a row, sometimes allowing to get rid of whole journal issues within a few seconds. For most efficient time-saving, words signalling insignificance are more useful than words attracting curiosity. |
| A third solution is to let someone else do the reading. E.g., you could consult my literature digest to learn what I found interesting during the last 12 months or so. Or we read the science notes in the newspapers, so the science journalists do the job for us. And most of them do a good job, I'm often impressed by the actuality and the high level of these articles. |
| Sometimes I'm disappointed and sorry about the meager echo my writings have. But if I consider how cruel I deal myself with tables of contents (mostly not even noticing author names), I should not be too surprised that NMDA receptor affinities of 1,2-diphenylethylamines, structure-activity relationships of etomidate derivatives, and new selective inhibitors of steroid 11ß-hydroxylation are not attracting the masses. |
| My real concern, however, is this conditioning to keywords signalling quick rejection. Forced by the mere flood of information drowning our interests each day, we are forced to adopt this negative strategy, simply as last resort to survive and not to drown. This attitude deepens the trenches between the disciplines and invites superficial judgements based on prejudice rather than on profound understanding. |
| 3/10 < MB
(7/10) > 7/10 Hardships of scientific research |
| See also the excellent essay by Nicholas Carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid? Atlantic Magazine (July/August 08). |