International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences
Edited by David L. Sills. The Macmillan Co & The Free Press, NY, 1968. Vol. 13. pp. 112 117
SCIENTIFIC COMMUNICATION
by Norman Kaplan and Norman W. Storer
The term "scientific communication" refers to the exchange of information and ideas among
scientists in their roles as scientists. Menzel (1958, p. 6) defines it as "the totality of publications,
facilities, occasions, institutional arrangements, and customs which affect the direct or indirect
transmission of scientific messages among scientists." It is distinguished from everyday
communication about physical reality in that it has reference to a particular body of generalized,
codified knowledge. Ideally, each and every communication contributes to the corpus of
accepted knowledge identified as science. This is accomplished chiefly by extending the
boundaries, by modifying previously held hypotheses, and by introducing additional precision,
clarification, or verification of existing knowledge.
Although the preferred means and the practices associated with scientific communication have
undergone change in the last few centuries, full and open communication of scientific results has
always been a foundation stone of modern science. With the establishment of the academies in
the seventeenth century, word-of-mouth exchange of information and informal meetings were
very quickly supplemented by informal correspondence and exchange of letters concerning
scientific work and. later, by a quasi-institutionalized arrangement embodied in the office of
secretary or correspondent; finally, these were followed by formal journals containing the
proceedings of meetings and other communications. The scientific enterprise of that era was
small enough to permit reasonably adequate communication on the basis of the small number of
journals and the occasional publication of books, supplemented by face-to-face interaction and
correspondence by letter.
The so-called "communications explosion" in science is new primarily in the sense that it is now
widely recognized as a problem. But as Price (1963) has pointed out, the amount of scientific
publication has been growing exponentially, doubling every ten to fifteen years over the past
three centuries. While there is no universal agreement, one of the more "conservative" estimates
is that there are over thirty thousand scientific journals presently in existence and that there are
more than a million papers published in them each year (Gottschalk & Desmond 1962; Bourne
1962). The sheer number of papers being produced annually has brought open recognition of a
number of serious communication problems. Among the more important ones are the time lag
between the completion of a paper for publication and its appearance in a journal; the increasing
difficulty of "keeping up with the literature"; and the increasing difficulties in searching the
literature and retrieving relevant information. For these as well as a number of other reasons
centering on a growing awareness of the importance of science for national welfare, economic
growth, and even survival, interest in the communications problems of science has mushroomed
since the 1950s.
The communications explosion within science has given rise to concerted efforts to deal with the
problem on many fronts, especially with the aid of new technological advances. Through the use
of computers and a variety of other technical devices, efforts are being made to facilitate the
storage and retrieval of information, and considerable progress is being made along these lines
(see Stevens 1965). However, some questions have been raised about this approach in terms of
the changing functions of scientific communication. While professional librarians,
documentalists, editors, linguists, abstractors, mathematicians, and others now broadly
characterized as information experts seek to improve the effectiveness of scientific
communication largely by technical means, social scientists have begun to examine the social
aspects of the scientific communications process.
The study of scientific communication
Despite the growing interest in and support for studying the scientific communications system,
there is still little systematic knowledge about it. A review of what is known must, therefore, be
guided by a broad conceptual scheme rather than restricted to the specific questions now thought
to be crucial for an understanding of the subject. The scheme has three major components: the
functions of scientific communication, for scientists as well as for science generally; the various
channels through which communications flow; the intervening variables or situational factors
which influence the relationships between channels and functions.
Functions of communication. Menzel (1958) lists a number of functions performed by
scientific communication: (1) providing answers to specific questions; (2) helping the scientist to
stay abreast of new developments in his field; (3) helping him to acquire an understanding of a
new field; (4) giving him a sense of the major trends in his field and of the relative importance of
his own work, (5) verifying the reliability of information by additional testimony; (6) redirecting
or broadening his span of interest and attention; and (7) obtaining critical response to his own
work. He notes, too, Merton's seminal discussion (1957) of the importance to scientists of
professional recognition—a major reward for scientific achievement which is also carried by the
communications system of science.
An understanding of these functions helps to pinpoint specific problems in the communications
process and calls attention to the importance of the many different forms of communication
behavior in which scientists engage. Ibis is undoubtedly an important first step in going beyond
the purely technical aspects of the storage and retrieval of scientific information, and studies
concerned with these functions should lead not only to a better understanding of the
communications process in science but also, it is hoped, may have practical utility in suggesting
ways to improve the process.
One of the most important functions of communications for science as a whole is to provide a
cumulative record of the "certified" knowledge which exists at any given point in time. Without
such a record it is doubtful that science could continue to develop as a viable system. This record
constitutes the point of reference for each scientist, providing him with the foundation from
which he may make his own contributions toward extending what is known. This is not to imply
that what is already in the record is immutable. Quite the contrary—the record is always subject
to change in the light of new evidence, newly available techniques, and new discoveries. But
whether a contribution is an extension of previously accepted knowledge or a new interpretation
of what is already known it is always and necessarily a matter of the record.
The current communications crisis raises questions about the nature of this record as well as
about a number of widely held assumptions concerning the nature of the scientific
communications process. For example, the fact that a paper has been published has usually
implied that it has been reviewed by a jury of competent peers. However, there is at least the
suspicion that the continued proliferation of journals has inevitably "watered down" the rigor of
professional review. It is not even always possible to establish a simple correlation between the
quality of any particular scientific paper and the reputation of the particular journal in which it
appears. In any case, the quality of papers published is becoming an increasingly important
problem. No matter how much retrieval procedures may be improved, the question of what is
worth retrieving deserves much more attention.
Another major assumption has been that once a paper is published, not only is it accessible to the
scientific community, but also it will actually be read by the scientists concerned. However, the
flood of publications has tended to undermine the accessibility of relevant papers, at least within
the traditional communications practices. Not only may a single paper be buried in the flood of
all papers published, but accessibility is also impeded by the growing trend toward increased
specialization of journals, so that relevant papers may appear in sources not normally reviewed.
Finally, the flood of publications has made it impossible for any one scientist to read more than a
small fraction of what is potentially relevant. Some preliminary studies indicate that perhaps
only about 25 scientists may actually read any particular paper which is published.
Further, an increase in the amount of information in the field tends to place greater strain on the
integrative capacities of theory in that field, so that relationships among the contributions of
different scientists become more difficult to determine. As a body of knowledge becomes
"disorganized" in this way, the significance and even the validity of new contributions are more
difficult to assess, and effective scientific communication may become a property only of small
networks of scientists working on the same specific topics rather than of an entire discipline
(Hagstrom 1965).
Channels of communication. The growing awareness of informal or relatively private channels
of communication among scientists (U.S. President's . . . 1963; Schilling 1963-1964; Kaplan
1964) is but one aspect of the general problem of the different channels of communication and
the different functions of each. The various channels of scientific communication are usually
thought of as ranging from the most formal to the most informal, in terms of the degree to which
the information flowing through them is codified and generally available to all scientists. It is
perhaps more useful, however, to think of them as ranging from structured or planned channels
which are known about in advance (such as journals, books, and even announced meetings) to
unstructured channels through which information is accidentally acquired (such as finding useful
information in the literature while searching for something else, or a casual conversation which
yields unlooked-for information). A further complication must be introduced insofar as we are
dealing with a highly fluid situation in which yesterday's unstructured channels become
tomorrow's structured ones. The ease with which one can talk by telephone to a colleague three
thousand miles away may make this a far more effective means of finding particular bits of
information than the ordinarily accepted techniques of searching the literature.
While precise knowledge of the proportion of information important to scientists acquired
through various channels is still lacking, everything we know indicates that there is a much
greater reliance on "accidental" and unstructured channels than has formerly been realized.
Menzel (1958, p. 47) emphasizes that "it becomes imperative to consider the information
network as a system. . . . What is little better than an accident from the point of view of an
individual may well emerge as a predictable occurrence from a larger point of view."
While it is possible to try to match different channels with the different functions performed by
scientific communication as discussed above, in practice such an exercise appears to be futile.
Each of the functions listed can be, and apparently is, actually served by many different
channels. Thus, it is entirely possible that the answer to a specific question can be found in an
article in a published journal, in a preprint which arrived in the morning mail, during the course
of a telephone conversation with a colleague about some other matter, or in a chance encounter
in the corridors outside a scientific congress. A review article might be the best single source for
providing a sense of the major trends in a field, but one might also get the same results, and often
more quickly, from talking to a number of colleagues closely involved in the field. In the present
circumstances, it seems safe to say that merely exploring one channel or source (especially a
traditional one) is not necessarily the most effective way of treading through the maze of
messages being communicated.
Participation in structured channels. The literature of science, primarily journals, constitutes
the most important structured channel of communication within science; roughly two-thirds of
the scientists studied by several investigators cited the journals as the most important single
channel through which they learned of new developments in their fields of primary interest
(Menzel 1958; 1960). To keep up with secondary fields, scientists typically turn first to recent
textbooks and then to abstracts and review articles for guidance (Menzel 1958). The degree to
which a body of knowledge is theoretically well-organized seems to influence the concentration
of important information in specific channels; Menzel found chemists (a relatively wellorganized field) reporting that two-thirds of the articles they read would be found in the three
journals they listed as "most important," while zoologists (a relatively unorganized field)
reported that only a quarter of their reading would be found in three such journals. He found also
that an average of 8.18 journals was needed to account for 75 per cent of the nominations of
"three most important journals" by chemists, while the comparable figure for zoologists was
15.76 journals (1960).
Price (1963, table 2, p. 45)'suggests that 6 per cent of the men in a field will produce half the
published literature in that field and 2 per cent will produce about a quarter of it. Reasoning after
Lotka (1926) that the number of scientists producing n papers is proportional to 1/n2 (an inversesquare law of productivity), he calculates that the average scientist should produce about 3.5
papers during his working career. Meltzer (1956), however, found that U.S. physiologists had
produced an average of four to five papers (including chapters in books and coauthored papers)
within three years, and Schilling (1963-1964) seems to arrive at an even higher figure for the
lifetime productivity of bioscientists.
Such figures are not directly related to the use of the literature; Price (1963) finds that the "half
life" of a given article is about 15 years; that is, half of the articles cited by papers published in a
given year will be less than 15 years old. Various other studies indicate that the half life in use is
much shorter than this; more than half of the withdrawals from two technical libraries studied
were less than five years old, and more than half of the "reading acts" by scientists in a U.S.
government laboratory were devoted to materials less than two months old (Menzel 1960).
The amount of time a scientist devotes to the use of structured channels probably varies greatly
with situational factors, although little is known about this at present. On the basis of some
25,000 random-time observations of 1,500 U.S. chemists, Halbert and Ackoff (1958) conclude
that nearly 50 per cent of their subjects' time is spent in some form of communication and a third
of it in specifically scientific communication. Roughly 10 per cent of the chemists' time is spent
in general discussion, slightly less than this in receiving information orally, the same amount in
reading unpublished materials, and about 5 per cent is spent in reading published materials.
Estimates of the proportion of reading done for "specific uses" rather than for "general interest"
vary from 20 to 80 per cent, and they are probably influenced heavily by the ways in which the
data were gathered as well as by situational factors (Menzel 1960).
A number of studies report that the average amount of time per week spent in reading published
materials is about five hours, but situational factors are again highly important. Scientists in
basic research seem to devote only half as much time to reading as do scientists in applied
research; however, the former are much more concerned with archival literature, while the latter
make greater use of unpublished literature (Menzel 1960). Tornudd (1958) suggests that physical
isolation from channels of oral communication produces greater dependence among Danish and
Finnish scientists upon published literature, and the rate at which a field is developing seems also
to be important—the more rapid the advances, the greater the reliance upon relatively
unstructured channels (Menzel 1958).
Schilling's study of bioscientists (1963-1964) found that age is unrelated to dependence on
written, as compared with oral, channels; the bioscientists typically rate the latter as only half as
important as the former. Moreover, women in the biological sciences seem slightly more
dependent on the literature, probably because they have fewer opportunities to engage in
unstructured communication: they visit other laboratories less often, hold fewer professional
offices, and receive fewer preprints.
As the amount of published literature increases, scientists are turning to other structured channels
as well as to unstructured channels. On- (1964) notes a steady increase in the number of
meetings and conferences held in the biomedical sciences each year since 1927. an increase in
the attendance at such meetings, and a slight increase since 1947 in the percentage of research
funds used for travel. Menzel's study of 76 scientists (1958) found that they attended an average
of 2.5 meetings per year, and Garvey (see American Psychological Association . . . 1964) found
that psychologists in an academic setting attended an average of three per year, while those in a
government laboratory averaged about two. Yet Menzel notes that relatively few scientists admit
obtaining significant information from the formal presentations at meetings and concludes that
"the functions of scientific meetings are not those which ostensibly motivate the bulk of their
programs, but other forms of communication —symposia, corridor meetings, the presence in one
room of those interested in a single area . . ." (1960, vol. l, p. 47).
Unstructured communication. Unstructured (sometimes called informal or unplanned)
communication among scientists often provides specific information which a scientist knows he
needs, but probably its major importance lies in providing him with useful information which he
did not know existed. Scientists generally report between 65 and 90 per cent success in locating
needed information in the literature (Menzel 1960; Tomudd 1958), but they obviously cannot
estimate their success in obtaining information of which they are unaware.
Such unknown information varies from the specific (a new experimental technique) to the
general (news that another individual is working on a particular problem), but it is almost always
obtained, directly or indirectly, "by accident." Considering the usual delays in publication and
the general difficulties involved in keeping abreast of the literature, it is presumptive evidence of
the efficiency of unstructured channels that only about one scientist in five reports ever having
received information "too late"—that is, information which would have influenced the course of
his research had he received it sooner (Menzel 1960).
Menzel notes four major unstructured channels through which information reaches scientists: a
scientist informs a colleague of his current interests and is given an item of pertinent information
in return; a colleague conveys information which he knows the scientist will be interested in; a
colleague volunteers the information while they are together for a different purpose; and he finds
a useful item of information in the literature while searching for something else. In all but the
last, the scientist is dependent on his colleagues, who will know of his needs and interests only if
he tells them or if they are indicated by his previous publications. The effectiveness with which a
scientist uses these channels, then, would seem to be related both to his ability to make his needs
known and to the frequency with which he comes into contact with other scientists in his field.
The flow of professional recognition. Unstructured channels can operate effectively only so
long as scientists feel the need to assist each other and share the values of "communism" and
"disinterest-edness" which encourage them to share their findings freely, without regard for
personal gain (Mer-ton [1949] 1957, pp. 556-560). Yet personal gain of an honorific nature is
involved; Mcrton has referred to this as professional recognition (1957), and Storer (1966) has
suggested that it is "competent response" to a contribution. If information flows in one direction
through the various channels of scientific communication, response to it flows in the other.
Anything which signifies the value, to one or more scientists, of information received from
others—eponymy, prizes, election to professional office, footnotes, even personal thanks—
serves to sustain the scientist's motivation through confirming the goodness of his work and his
successful performance as a scientist. Glaser (1964) has documented some of the consequences
for the motivation and career plans of scientists when there is a lack of "adequate recognition."
but work on the various channels through which recognition flows .has barely begun (Kaplan
1965o).
Improving scientific communication
The extent and success of efforts to speed and to make more effective the dissemination of
information in science vary greatly by fields. In physics, the weekly Physical Review Letters has
made it possible to bring brief announcements of recent findings to readers, usually within a
month of submission, and there is a variety of other newsletters, data-card services, and regular
announcements of work in progress which are now being established in different fields. The
American Psychological Association's Project on Scientific Information Exchange in Psychology
represents a major effort to develop and then apply new information to the improvement of
communication within the field of psychology.
Another technique, facilitated by the use of high-speed computers, is the citation index, which
enables one to trace the influence of a given paper forward in time; this will apparently be of
value to historians and sociologists of science as well as to those concerned with the substantive
content of the materials cited (Institute for Scientific Information 1964). The suggestion that
archival publication be partially replaced by central depositories, from which materials may be
acquired on request after learning of them through title lists and abstracts, has not yet met with
success; the obstacles to its adoption apparently lie more in the desire of scientists to be assured
that their contributions will go to a "guaranteed" audience (as when published in a journal) than
in the technical problems involved (U.S. Presidents . . . 1963).
Suggestions have also been made toward providing greater opportunity for scientists to make use
of unstructured channels of communication: encouraging attendance at meetings and visits to
other institutions, arranging teaching duties so as to leave some days free for travel, and allowing
more time at announced meetings for discussion sessions (Menzel 1958). Such suggestions are
basically concerned with increasing the amount of personal contact among scientists, and their
success will probably be contingent upon the amount of funds available for such purposes.
It may be predicted that the study of scientific communication will become increasingly
important as the difficulty of disseminating information widely and rapidly mounts. The field
requires much more work in conceptualizing the nature of the communications network and its
relation to the social structure of science, as well as in the collection of more data. While much
of the concern expressed today about problems’ of scientific communication focuses on
developing new techniques for the storage and retrieval of information, and while some concern
is focused on the social aspects of the communications process, very little attention has been
devoted to the underlying problem of what should be communicated and in what form.
Finally, there is little doubt that each scientist will have to bear a greater responsibility for the
transfer of information and not leave it largely to the professional documentalist. As a recent
analysis of the problems of scientific communication (U.S. President's . . . 1963, p. 1) notes,
"The technical community generally must devote a larger share than heretofore of its time and
resources to the discriminating management of the ever increasing technical record. Doing less
will lead to fragmented and ineffective science and technology."
[See also conferences; diffusion, article on interpersonal influence; information storage and
retrieval.]
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