One of my students is nearing then end of his PhD and we are starting to write up papers on his work, which concerns the mechanisms of deformation in nanowires. As is often the way with science, you start to discover that what you thought was a novel approach to a problem has been thought of elsewhere, or else the approach of others overlaps and intersects what you are currently doing. I am applying the finishing touches to one paper and yesterday I did a routine keyword search to see if anything new had appeared in the literature since Christmas. To my horror up came a paper that was not relevant to the current paper but appeared to to what I was hoping to do in the follow-on study after the student has finished.
The paper is frantically downloaded. My first thoughts are that the article is in an obscure Journal so perhaps it won’t carry a killer punch. But then I habitually rail against the pernicious influence of impact factors on the perception of research output, so one should judge a paper by its intrinsic merits and not by where it is packaged. On reading the paper I breathe a sigh of relief. The publication seems rushed and the interpretation of data inadequate or at least not considered in light of supporting data that they could have measured. On reflection, the paper reports the use of a new piece of kit, so maybe they had to get something out for a project review.
Panic over, I can return to the tasks in hand.
Congratulations on not being scooped, Brian! It’s an awful, bile swirling in the pit of the stomach feeling when this sort of thing happens, for me at least.
Much more satisfying is responding to reviewers who spew forth “This question has been fully dealt with elsewhere, See the paper by Utter, B.S. (2001)”; by reading said author’s words and realising that they say and do nothing of the sort, then demonstrating why the reviewer doesn’t understand the field. Result!!
(Shameless self promotion: This happened to
a friend of mineme recently, check it out in glorious, fullscreen, Acrobavision).Unfortunately we are judged on primacy of publication. If there are two groups homing in on a scientific target only the first across the line will be remembered. This is increasingly the case in our modern well connected world. As little as 50 years ago it was quite possible for groups to be working on similar projects and not even know of each others existence. In those happier times dual authorship of a concept was often ascribed even if the authors were not collaborating or even in communication with each other. Today, we are much less forgiving and I blame the journals/scientific publishing in part. One of the pernicious aspects of impact factors and h-indices is the drive to be first. This has led to the proliferation of letters and short communications to ensure one is first in press and the ever increasing role of non-expert gatekeeper editors whose role it is to act as a sift for perceived high impact work.
I agree with you here, Brian, even though I don’t have your, shall we say, more extensive background (50 years ago were happier times?). I was bemoaning some publishing practices with my tame PhD student yesterday: the LPU (Least Publishable Unit) approach means that ideas are published before they are thoroughly worked through, leaving the impression that more has been done on a topic than is actually the case. This seems to apply to your example above, and definitely applied to mine.
Having said that – there’s now much greater access to material, colleagues, collaborators,… from sources that were not so easy to get at 50 (or 15) years ago. This means there should be more responsibility on authors to make sure they’re not regurgitating/reinventing old ideas, although I don’t think this is always met.
The increased breadth of extra publication outlets and rate of publication, make keeping up with past and present literature an increasingly tough challenge (perhaps even more so for young researchers, as I
bitchedblogged about here). I agree that specialist editors would be much better equipped to keep on top of these issues.