October 23 - 29, 2023 | Everywhere

Evolving towards the info grid? by Victor Puntes

Recently,
discussing with colleagues we have reached the conclusion that the
amount of work that fitted in a decent paper now gives enough for three
or more. While until the early nineties, for example, a paper, in my
domain, would include the synthesis, characterization and applications
of a new material, today, the same work would feed a paper on the
synthesis, another the characterization and another the exploration into
the potential application. Even more, the same work can now appear
under different formats in different places to reach broader audiences.
As a consequence, scientific literature production has exploded, and as
all papers cite papers, cites have also dramatically increased and
therefore the impact factors. A silly though would be that this steams
from competence to publish more papers than your fellows, because,
finally, all papers are shorter and all scientific productions have
similarly increased maintaining the structural and essential differences
between high impact science and the rest. I have even asked to split
papers into two to sharpen the focus. In fact, the information is the
same in one or different pieces, the difference is that the smaller
pieces are more modulable and manipulable. More papers entails more
titles and abstracts and introductions, helping to semantisize the
information. The dissertation paper is evolving into a sort of linked
capsules, tidlers, where the information can be easily exchanged between
scientist of a broader spectrum of disciplines with a larger pool of
interests. This reduction in the format of the scientific
communications, the proliferation of short commumications and letters,
pushes us forward into a knowledge-information grid were the information
is easily exchangeable in real time. If this is so, and I think it is,
we should pay special attention and care of all the new communication
tools which are appearing and will take us from the infancy to the
maturity of the information age.

Posted in Open Access Week, NanoWiki