editorial
How Does Our Discipline Prosper?
I
n these times of troubled economics, many look to the gurus of business for the recipe for financial success. In this editorial, your Editor Guru will analyze the modes by which a scientific discipline prospers. “Discipline” is used in the sense of a subarea of the physical and biological sciences. Although the discipline that is to prosper is, naturally, analytical chemistry, my advice should apply to most others. How is prosperity sought? Certainly it is through dedicated teaching that young scholars are given the tools and insights to make their own contributions to the discipline. Certainly it also requires that our research efforts be skillful and imaginative and employ original approaches in addressing important measurements. Let us take these things as given, needed elements of prosperity. But they do not suffice. Understand that a discipline that resolutely sticks to a historical pattern of research activities (because that is what it considers its intellectual mission to be) will eventually encounter fulfillment and thus extinction. Science changes; recognize the directions of change in the boundaries of scientific understanding (in this case, how to perform chemical measurements), and change with them. Follow the boundaries even though they lead squarely into different but intellectually intersecting disciplines. Profit from an assault on the new challenges presented, and grow in the knowledge of how to solve measurement tasks on unfamiliar landscapes. You have some advantages in your fresh eyes and knowledge of how to measure chemical phenomena. At the same time, you recognize what has already been done. A prospering discipline must grow within itself by solving problems and measurement tasks that benefit the knowledge
10.1021/AC801632C 2008 AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY
Published on Web 08/29/2008
base, but the same must occur within intersecting disciplines. With the impact of your measurement contributions, you gain recognition and the respect of the intersecting disciplines. At the same time, your discipline must welcome the contributions of the practitioners of these intersecting disciplines as they invade yours with their own interests and unique abilities. A disinclination to insularity cuts both ways. Resist ideological positions on what your discipline is. Within analytical chemistry, there are many views of what it is. The Guru takes the viewOwell established in previous editorialsOthat analytical chemistry is the science of how one measures chemical phenomenaObroadly defined. This is a view completely consistent with the earlier admonitions for seeking disciplinary prosperity. Measurement problems exist throughout the sciences, and analytical chemists by their training know how to solve them. The preceding is also a recipe for success as a research journal. Analytical Chemistry welcomes imaginative, original research on chemical measurements of all kinds, and this is widely known by our prospective authors. If it is a good idea, send the results here. And in the breadth of the science that the journal impacts, you contribute to the prosperity of the discipline.
SEPTEMBER 1, 2008 / ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY
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