How to write and publish a scientific paper - Barbara Gastel, Robert A. Day 2022
The early history
Historical perspectives
Some preliminaries
I imagine the early scientists of the Royal Society involved in creating the first journals: If they came forward to 2020, everything in our world would shock and terrify them, but they’d find deep comfort in scientific journals.
—Michael Eisen
The early history
Human beings have been able to communicate for thousands of years. Yet scientific communication as we know it today is relatively new. The first journals were published about 350 years ago, and the IMRAD (introduction, methods, results, and discussion) organization of scientific papers has developed within about the past century.
Knowledge, scientific or otherwise, could not be communicated effectively until appropriate mechanisms of communication became available. Prehistoric people could communicate orally, of course, but each new generation started from essentially the same baseline because without written records to refer to, knowledge was lost almost as rapidly as it was found.
Cave paintings and inscriptions carved onto rocks were among the first human attempts to leave records for succeeding generations. In a sense, today we are lucky that our early ancestors chose such media because some of these early “messages” have survived, whereas messages on less-durable materials would have been lost. (Perhaps many have been.) On the other hand, communication via such media was incredibly difficult. Think, for example, of the distributional problems that the U.S. Postal Service would have today if the medium of correspondence were 100-lb (about 45-kg) rocks. It has enough troubles with 1-oz (about 28-g) letters.
The earliest book we know of is a Chaldean account of the Flood. This story was inscribed on a clay tablet in about 4000 BCE, antedating Genesis by some 2,000 years (Tuchman 1980).
A medium of communication that was lightweight and portable was needed. The first successful medium was papyrus (sheets made from the papyrus plant and glued together to form a roll sometimes 20 to 40 ft [6—12 m] long, fastened to a wooden roller), which came into use about 2000 BCE. In 190 BCE, parchment (made from animal skins) came into use. The Greeks assembled large libraries in Ephesus and Pergamum (in what is now Turkey), as well as in Alexandria. According to Plutarch, the library in Pergamum contained 200,000 volumes in 40 BCE (Tuchman 1980).
In 105 CE, the Chinese invented paper, the dominant medium of written communication in modern times—at least until the internet era. However, because there was no effective way of duplicating communications, scholarly knowledge could not be widely disseminated.
Perhaps the greatest single technical invention in the intellectual history of the human race was the printing press. Although movable type was invented in China in about 1100 CE (Tuchman 1980), the Western world gives credit to Johannes Gutenberg, who printed his 42-line-per-page Bible from movable type on a printing press in 1455 CE. Gutenberg’s invention was immediately and effectively put to use throughout Europe. By the year 1500, thousands of copies of hundreds of books were printed.
The first scientific journals appeared in 1665, when two journals, the Journal des Sçavans in France and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in England, began publication. Since then, journals have served as the primary means of communication in the sciences. As of late 2021, there were over 48,000 peer-reviewed scholarly journals, of which over 35,000 were in English. The number of articles published per year appeared to exceed 4 million. The number of journals, the number of articles submitted, and the number of articles published all have been increasing from year to year (STM 2021, pp. 15—17).