Scientific Journals--Specialists Need to Know Data, Lack Time to Read

Pity the heart specialist who wants to keep up.

He could read Cardiology, the American Journal of Cardiology and the American College of Cardiology Journal. The American Heart Journal and the British Heart Journal. Arteriosclerosis and Atherosclerosis.

And more. Much more.

Cardiologists are not alone in this. Physicists, entomologists, anthropologists, sociologists and everyone else who makes a living in science and medicine are deluged with magazines full of information they need to know but don’t have time to read.

“Too many people are publishing too many papers in too much of a hurry,” contends Dr. Thomas P. Stossel, former editor of the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Not everyone agrees that the huge volume of “the literature,” as it’s called, is necessarily a bad thing. But fretting about it is probably as old as the ritual of publishing scientific reports in periodicals.

‘The Normal Griping’

“This complaint: ‘Can’t keep up. Can’t keep up.’ People have been saying that forever,” says Henry Small, director of corporate research at the Institute for Scientific Information. “This is the normal griping of anybody who’s literate. Who can read all the new novels? Who can read all the newspapers?”

It all began in 1665. In January of that year, Le Journal des Savants came out in Paris, followed in March by the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in London.

The goal was to give learned men a convenient way to keep up with the scholarly observations of their fellows. The idea caught on. At the start of the 18th Century, there were about 100 journals. By the beginning of the 20th, there were 10,000.

Not only can nobody read all the journals, nobody can say with certainty how many there are.

Ulrich’s International Periodicals Directory lists about 31,000 scientific, medical and technical publications but doesn’t claim to know about all of them. Belver Griffith, professor of information studies at Drexel University, guesses that the worldwide total is somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 and is growing at a rate of 4% or 5% a year.

A browse through any science library shows just how diverse this enterprise is.

Narrower Horizons

A few journals have broad tastes. Nature and Science, as their names suggest, will publish articles about almost anything in science. But most are satisfied with narrower horizons. There is, for instance, Experimental and Applied Acarology (about ticks and mites), the Journal of Applied Ichthyology (fish) and the Clubroot News Letter (plant disease).

Some journals get to the point quickly in their titles. Yeast, Blood, Gut, Trees and Starch leave little doubt about their specialties. The International Journal of Aerial and Space Imaging, Remote Sensing and Integrated Geographical Systems and the International Multidisciplinary Journal Devoted to Swallowing and its Disorders are a bit less terse.

Some are downright obscure. Try to guess what K-Theory is about (mathematics). Or Stochastic Hydrology and Hydraulics (random models in water resources). Or the Journal of Paleolimnology (prehistoric waters). Or Genomics (gene mapping).

Many journals seem to overlap. In the area of drugs that affect the brain, there is Psycholopharmacology, the Journal of Psychopharmacology and the Journal of the British Association of Psychopharmacology, not to mention Neuropsychopharmacology.

They also spawn quickly. The young field of teaching computers to think has Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Artificial Intelligence Review and AI & Society, among others.

Reading these magazines is often heavy going, even for people who are conversant with, say, the nuances of applied acarology. Most sag with dry, formal write-ups of scientific experiments and observations. Even the most prestigious are booby-trapped with jargon that reduces simple ideas to properly academic tangles of verbiage.

‘Almost No Readers’

So does anyone read this stuff?

“The actual readership of fundamental scholarly journals appears to be quite low,” Griffith says. “The best-read articles in a standard, disciplinary-based journal will be read, at most, by 2% of the people who receive it. We found that there were almost no readers.”

Professional journals, such as those that go to doctors and engineers, may be more widely read. But how many journals about cardiovascular diseases--Ulrich’s lists about 135 of them--should a heart specialist be expected to plow through?

Dr. Arnold Relman, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, estimates that five or six, properly chosen, is all the average specialist needs to keep up with.

However, Stossel says there are probably plenty of doctors who read nothing but the throwaways, a disparaging term for the stacks of relatively readable newspapers and magazines, filled with drug ads, that arrive free in the mail each day.

With all of this information, much of it trifling, it’s no surprise that some magazines do nothing but tell people what’s in other magazines. Newsletters are devoted to terse condensations of the high points of the literature. Among these is the eight-page Journal Watch, published every other week by the Massachusetts Medical Society.

Hundreds of New Titles

“We try to point out what doctors should know about and let them know where they can find the article if they need it,” says Joe Elia, its executive editor. “Nobody can read everything, and I think some people throw up their hands and say, ‘There is so much. I can’t read any of it.”’

Yet with all this volume, the printing presses churn out hundreds of new titles each year, and established journals grow fatter.

The abstracting service of the American Chemical Society produces brief summaries of all the chemistry articles and patents it can find around the world. In 1957, it published 100,000. In 1966, it passed 200,000. In 1971, it exceeded 300,000. And in 1977, it went beyond 400,000. The rate of growth has slowed since then, but in 1987 it put out 476,178 abstracts from 13,000 journals.

And that’s just chemistry. Other areas are booming, too. For instance, the 40 journals of the American Institute of Physics published 23,042 articles in 1980. Last year, they published 33,955.

Computers haven’t done much to help cope with the avalanche of information. They have made the journals more accessible. Researchers can use them to scan big collections of titles and abstracts for interesting subjects.

However, once they zero in on the article they want to see, they still must go to the printed journal, since the full texts of reports are seldom kept in computers.

‘No Hypothesis Too Trivial’

The big-name journals are exclusive clubs. They publish a quarter or less of all the papers submitted to them. Most of the rejects eventually land in print in less choosy publications.