Is the Scientific Paper Obsolete?
If the scientific paper is obsolete, what are we going to do about it?
Despite recent efforts at modernization, the way we communicate science is broken.
We can’t tell what is true from marketing spin, misinformation, or disinformation. This has been coming at us for a long time. Not long ago there were few scientists exploring the natural world using a limited set of technologies and inventions. They communicated within small groups through informal letters. Since then, the world has experienced simultaneous increases in the number of scientists, the size of research teams, the diversity of new technologies and the complexity of experiments.
Because of this, it has become harder and harder to keep up with scientific knowledge.
There have also been changes in scientific workstyles. Research is more fast paced with no time for deep engagement in more than one scientific area. Science has become more specialized leaving scientists less informed about broader topics.
With increased pressure to publish, publication output per scientist has also increased. Researchers have little time to write high quality papers, and little incentive to write detailed reviews for the works of their colleagues. Predatory journals have not helped the situation. Escalating numbers of papers have left too few scientists available as reviewers. It’s not surprising that the quality of papers has fallen.
Exacerbating the situation, the pace of development of new technologies has been accelerating. While scientific advances are lauded by many, overly rapid progress impacts the effective training of experts. Many of these innovative technologies are complicated and lack of experts leaves researchers at the mercy of hype cycles surrounding the latest new new thing.
As for papers themselves, data sets have grown larger and richer. These are not amenable to the old style of minimalistic bar charts.
And if scientists can’t keep up, how do we expect the general public to do so?
Making scientific results more understandable will help to regain confidence in science. For this we need transparency, clarity and access. Standards for experimental documentation and data sharing can help. We’ve discussed these previously (Getting Started with FAIR).
To be sure there is a lot happening in this area through FAIR data initiatives and proposals for science communication. But we also need to address the problem of communicating results beyond static images in figures.
The Atlantic’s article from a few years ago, The Scientific Paper is Obsolete (which inspired the title of this post), encouraged adoption of computational notebooks, like Jupyter, to address the transparency of data analyses. Other articles, like this one, Envisioning the Scientific Paper of the Future, give a broad range of suggestions from adopting open access standards, teaching plain language writing, enhancing machine readability and improving peer-review processes.
In addition to these efforts, greater adoption of interactive data visualizations could also help make research results more accessible to a broader audience. There is important information outside the experimental study components themselves (metadata) that is critical for readers’ understanding. Serving this information up to the reader makes it easier to connect results to other areas of knowledge.
As this is an area of great interest to us, we highlight a few case studies here. Look for more of these to come.
Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash.
