How We Publish I would like to share a few remarks from a recent public lecture, given to a delightful audience a t Gettysburg College, on the publishing of research in the chemical sciences. The practices of individual scholars publishing their research in science and in the humanities are quite different; research in the latter is disseminated mainly in book form, and in the former almost entirely as articles in research journals. Scientific research articles are frequently like the "chapters" of a research story that the individual publishes gradually, over periods of months to years. The unfolding story reflects the progression from curiosity to ideas to hypotheses about a chemical measurement or phenomenon, followed by planning and execution of experiments to explore the ideas and, finally, interpretation of the results. The process rarely occurs neatly in a single phase; it is carried out in an irregular pattern of incremental insights and accomplishments, eventually resulting in revision of the original plan or hypothesis and redesign of the experiments. The unfolding of understanding is often a gradual, tenuous, and tantalizing process. In this framework, rarely does the individual researcher wait for the entire experimental story to be completed and for ultimate understanding to bloom (for it may never do so) before beginning to publish portions (chapters) of the story. A trail of research manuscripts ensues, describing the exploration and evolution of the idea as a gradually solidifying intellectual theme. The published research chapters that convey new insights-even if only at the beginning of the idea explorationfrequently stimulate additional ideas, applications, or criticisms by other researchers whose experiments and subsequently published studies result in a rapidly growing, multiply branching hi-
erarchy of new knowledge. This phenomenon of the interactions of ideas is an extremely prominent aspect of the growth of chemical science, and its pace is keyed to rapid dissemination of the research chapters in journals such as ANALYTICALCHEMISTRY. Proper functioning of such journals, including peer review, is a vital part of the hierarchical growth of knowledge about chemistry. In formulating these comments, I was struck by a paragraph in David Hull's book, Science as a Process, about convenient ambiguities (he calls them "weasel words") in the language used in research publications. I shared the following quotation with the Gettysburg audience: In science, "weasel words" serve an important positive function. They buy time while the scientists develop their positions. It would help, one might think, if scientists waited until they had their views fully developed before they publish, but this is not how the process of knowledge development in science works. Science is a conversation with nature, but it is also a conversation with other scientists. Not until scientists publish their views and discover the reactions of other scientists can they possibly appreciate what they have actually said. No matter how much one might write and rewrite one's work in anticipation of possible responses, it is impossible to avoid all possible misunderstandings, and not all such misunderstandings are plainly "misunderstandings." Frequently scientists do not know what they intended to say until they discover what it is that other scientists have taken them to be saying. Scientists show great facility in retrospective meaning-change.
While this is a bit tongue-in-cheek, I believe that the phenomenon of weasel words captures very well the complexity of hierarchical knowledge evolution in the chemical sciences. I hope that we never understand this exquisitely subtle, human-scholar interactive process well enough to try to either legislate or regularize it.
ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY, VOL. 64, NO. 9, MAY 1, 1992
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