In the Company of Microbes. Moselio Schaechter
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titles are more informative. But what about the reliability of the information provided? Therein lies the rub. Rosner entitled his article: Reflections of Science as a Product. As the title suggests, he saw the striking historical trend to reflect arrogance and even the loss of a guiding vision of science.
A tendency to view the science of biology as a product rather than a process has been bemoaned by various authors, most passionately by Carl R. Woese in an important essay: A New Biology for a New Century (2004) (3). Both Rosner and Woese place considerable blame on Jim Watson and his disciples, for whom science would seem to be necessarily goal-oriented. This belief appears to have taken hold because goal-oriented science has been extravagantly successful.
The issues raised by Rosner’s article have been revisited more recently in medical journals, e.g., by Neville Goodman (2000) (4) and Jeff Aronson (2009) (5). Goodman noted an exponential increase in active verbs in the titles of clinical trial reports. He undertook a review of 24 reports of clinical interventions published in 1996 with “prevents” in their titles. In at least eight of these cases, the intervention had not been preventive at all. What makes this frightening is evidence, cited by Goodman, that physicians sometimes make clinical decisions from the titles of journal articles. I suspect that authors of reviews in which the bibliography runs to many hundreds of items occasionally take similar shortcuts. Goodman concludes: “There may be arguments for reviews and editorials carrying informative [in the sense of declarative] titles, but they are too often wrong to have any place in the reporting of research. Journals should ask for indicative titles, or alter investigators’ informative titles during sub-editing.”
I find it comforting to know that the Journal of Bacteriology in its current Instructions to Authors disallows titles in numbered series and explicitly states: “Avoid the main title/subtitle arrangement, complete sentences, and unnecessary articles” (emphasis added). To my knowledge none of the other journals with which I am familiar recommend that their potential authors avoid declarative titles, although the rarity of such titles a mere forty years ago suggests that editorial pressure to stay with indicative titles may well have prevailed at the time.
Aronson notes with dismay that: “in the last 15 years, declarative titles have found a new sponsor—evidence-based medicine. Using declarative titles was one of the declared procedures of the journal Evidence-Based Medicine, when it was launched in 1995, and in 2003, The Journal of Clinical Epidemiology started not only to publish declarative titles but also to commission them, claiming that such titles would be more informative. “Indicative’ titles, they said, “give the purpose of a study,” and “declarative” (or “informative”) titles “give the conclusion.” Although, as one declarative title has put it, “The evidence provided by a single trial is less reliable than its statistical analysis suggests” (5).
Aronson, considering all that can be hidden from view in a declarative title, concludes: “At best, declarative titles mislead; at worst they may enshrine a falsehood as a permanent truth.” This may be overstating the case, but in my view, not by much. When editors succumb to the lure of the sound-bite mentality, it is up to authors to resist. There remains the topic of humor. It would be foolish of me to inveigh against humor, as I have ventured, more than once, to be witty in a scientific context. Humor can serve as an enticement to read on. However, much of what passes for humor in the titles or texts of articles strikes me as an embarrassment and should have been suppressed by an editor or reviewer or, better still, the author.
In finding the proper balance between truth and clarity, teacher and researcher are prone to make different choices. Elio has been and continues to be a superlative teacher; his blog is admired as a teaching aid. My career in science has been almost entirely in research. If my remarks reflect a rather jaundiced view of progress, so be it. I hope they will stimulate useful discussion.
References
1. Rosner JL. 1990. Reflections of science as a product. Nature, 345:108.
2. A specific marker of the change is the near disappearance from contemporary literature of the “On” that graced the indicative titles of seminal works of previous generations: On Growth and Form (1916) by D’Arcy Thompson, On the Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin, and all the way back more than two millennia to De Rerum Natura [On the Nature of Things] by Lucretius to name only three. I miss “On…..
3. Woese CR. 2004. A New Biology for a New Century. Microbiol Molec Biol Revs 68: 173-186.
4. Goodman, NW. 2000. Survey of active verbs in the titles of clinical trial reports. BMJ 320:914-915.
5. Aronson, J. 2009. When I use a word…Declarative titles. QJM; 103:207-9. Available online
Elio Replies
Michael Yarmolinsky brings his powerful powers of insight to examine the reasons I mentioned for believing that the quality of scientific writing may be on the rise. He suggests that the greater use of the active form may be due to grammar checking programs. I wouldn’t know as mine is turned off. Incidentally, I distrust the spelling program because it can’t tell “does not” from “doe snot.” Then come the titles. Michael agrees that they have become more informative but wonders if they may also have become less reliable. Guess what: there is even some data to suggest that. However, the studies cited by Michael are mainly of medical journals, some big on clinical trials. I don’t really know, but I wonder if this applies to non-clinical science journals. Not to be flip about it, but despite some overlap the two have different aims, thus may respond to different societal pressures. The need for the papers to be convincing may be greater in the former than the latter. More “basic” articles don’t need to “sell” themselves.
September 16, 2010
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* The irony of this clearly stated and often cited observation is that there appears to be some uncertainty as to whether Bohr has been correctly quoted.
14
Finally, Farewell to “Stamp Collecting”...
by Christoph Weigel
A perspective paper by Margaret McFall-Ngai and colleagues was recently featured by Elio in this blog, strongly emphasizing its Chicxulub-like impact on microbiology. Here I offer a postscript, a few loosely connected thoughts from a historical perspective about its impact on biology and life sciences in general.
Until the ’50’s of the last century, advancement in biology was largely the product of three overlapping generations—students, active scientists, and emeriti—laboring over methods, paradigms, concepts, and theories. With few exceptions, these were European and North American men. Theories put forward by the emeriti during their active time tended to be overthrown by their former students who now become active scientists themselves: a spiral of slow progress. Since experiments were tedious and methodological progress slow, scientists were inclined to heated debates regarding concepts and theories. Few theories held for more than one generation, notable exceptions being Darwin’s insight of evolution, Mendel’s concept of inheritance, and the cell theory by Schleiden and Schwann. Collecting thousands of different mosses or pinning thousands of insects for a museum collection was considered at least equally important as experiments, the lattermost often designed to prove an existing theory rather than to generate a new testable hypothesis. Nevertheless, Louis Pasteur’s experiments disproving the spontaneous generation of life and Robert Koch’s postulates for proving disease causation can be considered to have ushered in the dawn of experimental biology.
By the late twentieth century, biologists were diligently