Tracking Research in the Fast Lane

WASHINGTON—Whether the topic is AIDS or supernovas or high-temperature superconductivity, the blistering pace of discovery is prompting researchers in hot fields to flock to special meetings, spend hours on the phone, scan computer data bases and swap reams of journal article preprints in an effort to keep up and to record their own contributions. As scientists in those fields become increasingly dependent on such methods, however, some are concerned that the resultant short cuts have lowered the standards for reporting scientific information, injected an element of rancor and confused what is usually an orderly process. Scientific meetings, often set up on short notice, have become essential to staying abreast of developments. Tom Mason said he and six other members of a team studying phase equilibrium in superconductive ceramics at Northwestern University's Materials Research Center take turns traveling to sessions around the country. There's no substitute, he feels, for hearing others in the field explain their latest results. "You come away from a meeting feeling that, as of the time you lay your head on your pillow at night, you know the latest scoop about where this field is," he said. "Of course, that won't necessarily be true by the next day." Such meetings can have a slapdash spontaneity in which organizers may not know in advance the number or names of the speakers, much less what they're going to say. The program for the March annual meeting of the American Physical Society had already been printed when superconductivity discoveries burst forth in January, APS Executive Secretary William Havens observed. In organizing the memorable March 18 evening session at the New York Hilton, Havens said, "we just had to play it by ear. The whole thing was put together essentially from Sunday to Wednesday." Such timeliness exacts a price. "At these spontaneous meetings there is an enormous ratio of noise to signal," said Robert Dynes, director of chemical physics at Bell Labs. "On the other hand, it's extremely valuable to know what people are thinking about …where your colleagues and competitors are drifting." Wheat Worth the Chaff None of the superconductivity re ports presented at the overflow special session were screened in advance, Havens acknowledged. "Certainly there was some crap in there," he said. "So what? There may even have been some charlatans." But the excitement of sharing research data that were in some cases only hours old more than compensated for the uneven quality, he indicated. By contrast, about 40 people at tended the first session to focus entirely on Supernova 1987A, held June 5-6 at the University of Minnesota. The organizers, physics professors Keith Olive and Tom Walsh, limited the speakers to 17 researchers whose work was familiar to them. "We deliberately tried to keep it small so there'd be a lot of discussion," Walsh said. "In any hot field, there's always a gigantic meeting with hundreds of people in which you hear virtually everything being done in a field, so it's hard to get into an argument with the guy giving the talk. We were trying very hard not to slip into that mold." Besides attending meetings, re searchers are relying increasingly on the telephone, facsimile ma chine and electronic mail for learning what colleagues are doing. And those seeking recognition for their contributions to superconductivity studies, new AIDS treatments or supernova theory are circulating preprints to a growing number of colleagues. Unpublishable Papers "The preprint route is almost saturated," Dynes noted. "I have a stack on my desk that's a foot and a half high. A lot of those probably won't be published, because the people who wrote them know so much more now that they'd be embarrassed." Yet precisely because today's results may be obsolete tomorrow, "there's a tremendous pressure to publish, and to publish quickly," said Mason. That pressure, some researchers acknowledge, tends to make them less careful about corroborating results before making an announcement. "There are a lot of mistakes being made," Ma son noted. Minas Kafatos, a George Mason University physics professor organizing a supernova workshop set for October, pointed out that the first papers on that phenomenon "were really put together in a big rush." Published reports have be-come increasingly sophisticated, he said, as more scientists focus on the subject and analyze their data in light of other results. "By October," he predicted, "most of the dust will have settled." Research fever in some cases has exacerbated egoism and greed, as scientists conjure up visions of Nobel Prizes or lucrative contracts at the rainbow's end. "What's going on right now is a little unpleasant," said Dynes, "not on a personal level but on a frenzied-feeding level. The stakes are very high, and there's excitement that I've never seen before." "The down side is that people are probably sending out manuscripts that are less professional than they would otherwise be," containing "more raw data and less careful thought that you would expect in the archival journals." In fact, Dynes added, "there are going to be some papers in print that people would rather not have done." But all hot fields tend to cool off eventually. In the superconductivity field, said Mason, "we may be coming to a plateau where we settle back to a higher but rather stable pace where it doesn't matter if I see that guy's paper next week as op posed to today." Greene is on the staff of The Scientist.

Tracking Research in the Fast Lane

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