Editor's Note: In honor of last month's announcement of the 1995 winners of the Nobel Prizes, The Scientist here reprints essays written by two of this year's laureates: Martin Perl, a co-winner in physics, and F. Sherwood Rowland, a corecipient of the chemistry prize. These articles discuss the situation surrounding the research, writing, and submission of the extraordinarily highly cited (and, now, Nobel Prize-winning) research papers describing their investigations.
These two pieces were first published in the mid-1980s as "Citation Classic" essays in Current Contents, published by the Philadelphia-based Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). Perl's essay describes the discovery of electron-positron annihilations, which led to his team's discovery of a new atomic particle, the tau lepton. Rowland's essay discusses the first detailed report on the chemical reactions affecting chlorofluoromethanes after their release into the environment. The essays are reprinted here with the permission of ISI.
Written by Martin L. Perl, ...
