Screw Anything Published Before 1960-Whatever : On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess

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The Egyptian goddess Isis was celebrated as the ideal wife and mother. The blogger known as Dr. Isis has some fancy-sounding degrees and is a physiologist at a major research university working on some terribly impressive stuff. She blogs about balancing her research career with the demands of raising small children, how to succeed as a woman in academia, and anything else she finds interesting. Also, she blogs about shoes. In fact, she blogs a lot about shoes.

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Screw Anything Published Before 1960-Whatever

Posted on: October 21, 2009 3:01 PM, by Isis the Scientist

It is pouring rain today and I am saying, "Screw it." If I find an old paper not electronically available, and I would have to walk out in the rain to get it, then I just don't need it bad enough to put it in this manuscript.

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Comments

Interlibrary loans can often allow you to have a scanned PDF emailed to you at home. Of course not for a couple of days, but, you know, no rain...

Posted by: BroccoliofDoom | October 21, 2009 3:19 PM

In my field, the issue is not so much how old the paper is, but whether my library has an e-subscription to the journal, or whether the journal makes its back issues readily available online. Just this week I downloaded a PDF of a paper that was published in 1910. If it's one of my society journals, no problem (except that for one of their journals they somehow don't hold the copyright for volumes 1-3). If it's available from the library, I can usually (but not always) get it online. But some publishers put themselves at a disadvantage by putting their e-content behind a pay wall. (Yeah, I'm talking to you, Elsevier, and you, Nature Publishing Group, and certain others as well.) That makes me less willing to track down those references.

There was a time--say, about ten years ago--when I would have been willing to walk over to the library in search of a reference, and wait for the interlibrary loan if the library didn't have it. But that was before such content was widely available by internet. These days, I'm with Isis: I want it all, I want it now, and if I can't have it then it probably wasn't important enough for me to read.

Posted by: Eric Lund | October 21, 2009 4:34 PM

Yeah... I just say screw anything not available via e-journale 90% of the time. It better be a *very* important paper to drag me all the way to the library!

Posted by: Joe Jackson | October 21, 2009 5:30 PM

Wait, there were journals back then? I thought they only used cave drawings back in those days.
Why on earth would you go back that far? There couldn't possibly be anything valuable in it.

P.S. BroccoliofDoom = best handle ever.

Posted by: annoying young'in | October 21, 2009 6:16 PM

Does your library not send you PDF *scans* of the original print articles?? I can ask for mine (assuming we had a print subscription way back in the day) via electronic request form and receive a scanned PDF via email within 48 hours. That's their guaranteed turn-around, though they usually manage to send them back in about 4 hours.

Call your library - they should have this service in place for sure.

Posted by: ambivalent academic | October 21, 2009 7:01 PM

I had a professor who regularly cites articles from the late 1800s. His favorite paper to cite is one from 1899. OMGWTFBBQ. @_@

Posted by: Nekohime | October 21, 2009 8:31 PM

I'll be the token curmudgeonly voice for going to the library, at least on non-rainy days.

In my field, there's an epidemic of Science and Nature papers being published that are essentially identical to papers from the 1960s (themselves published in C/N/S). The modern authors didn't know of those classic papers, the two or three reviewers didn't know of those classic papers, and it's just embarrassing for the modern researchers involved when someone does recognize this after publication. I mean, who wants their department to find out that the Science paper you spent two years working on should have an asterisk next to it stating "oops, I should have known about the functionally equivalent paper from 42 years ago, my bad." It deprives the original researchers of the appropriate credit as others unwittingly cite the newer paper, and it contributes to an environment where actually novel work gets thrown to lower impact journals because the papers are longer and have more than 30 citations...

I have concretely observed that, in my field, those who don't read the literature are doomed to repeat it, at the expense of taxpayer-funded consumables and man-months.

While I love my uni's .pdf article delivery service, there is also value in going to the physical stacks. I invariably find an edited book or two I want to skim while I'm in the appropriate LofC section -- and book chapters are unindexed and virtually invisible in the online .pdf world. People /still/ write book chapters, and they include material that isn't published anywhere else, often because the authors can let loose and be more speculative.

By all means, make the library your fairer weather friend... but ignore the less-indexed literature at your own peril. Especially in the age of research blogging that can expose and spread word of any mistakes made in publications.

Posted by: phagenista | October 21, 2009 9:22 PM

those who don't read the literature are doomed to repeat it

I'll concede this point, which is prevalent to some degree in a lot of fields. While most of the literature in my field is new stuff, there are many bold, new rediscoveries where neither authors nor referees seemed to know about similar work published 20 years earlier. And once in a while, I'll need a textbook or some such thing which is actually worth a trip to the library. But those occasions are rare and becoming rarer. Often, either I or one of my colleagues down the hall will already have the book in question, and I don't need to visit the library to find it.

The problem is that it's so easy to get so much from the comfort of the office. There are many journals for which I can get online content all the way back to volume 1 (which in at least a few cases was published sometime in the 19th century). There are other journals whose content is entirely behind a pay wall. Guess which journals I am more likely to cite.

Posted by: Eric Lund | October 21, 2009 10:30 PM

The old literature in my field is awesome. People relied more on careful observation, and from time to time described phenomena they couldn't explain. I think it is really neat- now in the genomic era- to be able to go back and explain, and understand an important phenotype at the molecular level, in a way that wasn't previously possible.

That is one of the reasons I do science. I'd walk through the rain for that any day. Although... we do have awesome electronic access and librarians who will find just about anything for us.

Posted by: drdrA | October 22, 2009 9:57 AM

Warm spring rain or sleety autumn rain?

Posted by: incontinentia buttocks | October 22, 2009 3:59 PM

I was surprised to see the handle "phagenista" on the one comment above; the one called "glfadkt" and I have had similar conversations on multiple occasions. Less of a problem now that the AJPs go back to the stone age, but one does ignore pre-electonic literature at one's own peril.
Besides, there is something quaint about reading studies that are not necessarily hypothesis driven or extramurally funded.

Posted by: Pascale | October 22, 2009 4:13 PM

I find that reading the older literature helps me understand the logic of current theories, and also inspires me to try new/old methodologies

Posted by: lizzielou | October 26, 2009 9:17 PM