In his letter to The Scientist, (Oct. 16, 1989, page 15) in response to my essay, "The Journal Glut" (The Scientist, July 10, 1989, page 11), Allan Wittman correctly recognizes that much of the original essay was written tongue-in-cheek. But humor is frequently only a funny way of being serious. Wittman says the proliferation of scientific journals represents both an increase in scientific information and the essential need for scientists to know what other scientists are doing. In fact, appro

The proliferation of scholarly journals in the perilous “publish or perish” academic climate of the last 20 years has produced considerable concern recently, particularly among college and university librarians, who must figure out what to do with them. For example, on an average day the medical school library to which I have access receives 50 new journal issues, taking up a total of 2 ft. of shelf space. The main campus library subscribes to about twice as many journals, and a

We’ve all seen it a thousand times in the literature: “Figure 2 shows the results of a ‘typical’ experiment ...“ Now, Webster defines typical as “pertaining to a type; being a representative specimen.” And an informal survey of my nonscientific friends and relatives resulted in the following list of synonyms for typical: something that usually happens, average, normal, ordinary, and ho-hum. But to scientists publishing research papers, “typica

Collaboration “to work together, especially in a joint intellectual effort.” So says Mr. Webster. In practice, however, we all know that collaboration involves the art of getting credit for someone s work, an intellectual effort that can leap continents and disciplines in a single bound. I didn’t realize that during my first attempt at collaboration. Several years ago I spent some time using the Dodge procedure to produce ghosts from pig red blood cells. This entails lysing