Origin of the specialized literature
In the beginning was the General Scientific Journal. And the General Scientific Journal begat the Specialty Journal, and the Specialty Journal begat the Single-Subject Journal, whether according to class of compounds, specific disease, or methodology. And the Single-Subject Journal begat the Interdisciplinary Journal to link up the specialties at an earlier evolutionary date. And the scientific community saw the journals were good, and they were fruitful and multiplied.
Eliot M. Berry, in 1981
New England Journal of Medicine In the later decades of the eighteenth century, scientists along with their societies and publications became more specialized as a means of coping with the flood of technical knowledge, particularly in the fields of physics and chemistry. The age of the generalist and inspired amateur of science was in decline.  | | University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center |  Before the periodic table of elements, scientists used arcane symbols to organize chemical "substances." |
One of the first general scientific journals aimed at serious researchers was the Observations et mémoires sur la physique, sur l'histoire naturelle et sur les arts, founded in 1773 by François Rozier. As Rozier eloquently, if brusquely, put it in the preface to the first volume: "We will not offer to idle amateurs purely agreeable works or the sweet illusion of believing themselves to be initiated into science of which they know nothing...We offer this collection to the truly knowledgable." He further asserted that the journal itself would "reject everything that is nothing more than undigested compilation and that is wanting in new and useful views." At the founding of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1831, William Whewell suggested that membership be restricted to those "who have published written papers in the memoirs of any learned society." He wanted to exclude as members those who were not, as one critic of the Royal Society put it, "labourers in the vineyard" of science. This general desire for higher professional standards in science led to an influx of individual articles primarily aimed at subject-matter experts. It also spawned the first great specialty journals in the natural and physical sciences from Germany, France, and England.
Types of scientific article
Over the centuries, five types of scientific article have emerged: theoretical, experimental, observational, methodological, and review. These types are distinct, each having a different purpose, though closely intertwined. s New Roman" size=3>Theoretical articles focus on explaining natural events, often suggesting experiments or observations that might confirm the explanations. They offer the new conceptual variations that drive the continued evolution of science. Experimental articles recount the manipulations of natural objects, usually in artificial settings such as research laboratories. They provide the empirical information essential for the continued conceptual evolution of science. Observational articles describe natural objects, usually outside the laboratory. They involve such activities as describing a new hummingbird or fossil or measuring the spectrum of a new star; they do not primarily involve manipulating natural objects under controlled conditions. Observational articles complement the experimental; they exist because part of the task of science will always involve describing the natural world outside the laboratory. In addition, as cosmology and paleontology demonstrate, some phenomena that interest science will always be closed to direct experimentation. Methodological articles do not usually make new claims about the natural world but present new means for facilitating and creating experiments and improving observations. They are about the tools used to create new science. Review articles describe and evaluate the recent literature in a field; they usually contain no major claims not presented in previous articles. While their purpose is to interpret past science, not invent new science, they serve an indispensable function--winnowing the fit from the unfit among the other four types. They constitute a second tier of peer review, one far more selective than the first. Invention of the modern graph
Scientific articles with no graphs? For the present-day reader that's hard to imagine. Yet, the modern graph was not "invented" until the late eighteenth century, a hundred years after the scientific journal made its debut. At that time, it was used extensively by the German physicist Johann Heinrich Lambert and the English economist William Playfair.  | | University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center | | William Playfair was the first to use color graphs to show economic data. |
In this visual form, the author typically plots some independent variable, such as time, on the abscissa (horizontal axis) and some dependent variable, such as a physical or chemical property that changes over time, on the ordinate (vertical axis). This arrangement is ideally suited for communicating multiple data points at a glance, visually representing cause and effect, uncovering trends in a large mass of data, and making comparisons among multiple data sets. As astronomer J. F. W. Herschel noted in an 1833 article, "Such charts [blank ones with pre-drawn axes]...are so very useful in a great variety of purposes, that every person engaged in...physico-mathematical inquiries of any description, will find his account in keeping a stock of them always at hand." The steadily increasing use of graphs during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has greatly contributed to the scientific article moving away from the descriptive and qualitative, toward the mathematical and quantitative. The graph now has to be considered the premier form for scientific visual representation, supplanting geometric diagrams and realistic drawings of natural objects and research equipment.Invention of the periodic table of elements
 | | University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center | | Dimitri Mendeleev's periodic table became one of the foundations of modern chemistry. |
Similar to graphs during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tables also became a more common ingredient of the scientific article as a means of coping with its ever expanding reliance on the quantitative. One of the most remarkable and wonderful of all tables in science has to be Dimitri Mendeleev's periodic table, the backbone of modern chemistry. In three 1869 articles and the book Osnovy khimii (The principles of chemistry), Mendeleev published the first versions of his table, which organized the 65 known chemical elements into rows and columns guided by the increasing order of their atomic weights and chemical properties. According to Mendeleev, "The definition of [atomic] mass gave a means of analyzing and grasping chemical transformations of substances, and for arriving at the atom, while the mass of the atom was shown by the periodic law to influence all its chief chemical properties" (trans. from Russian by George Kamensky). More important, in an 1871 article he forecast that gaps in the table would be filled by the discovery of new elements with predictable properties. Mendeleev's prediction was confirmed with the discovery of gallium in 1875, scandium in 1879, and germanium in 1885. In 1913, Henry Moseley reported that the number of protons in a given element (atomic number) worked better than atomic mass as a basis for arranging the periodic table. During the twentieth century, scientists have discovered many new elements predicted by the periodic law and invented many new arrangements of the periodic table, including spiral and triangular versions, as well as ones designed for the World Wide Web. Since the mid-1990s, scientists have welcomed into the periodic fold six more elements, the heaviest being elements 116 and 118 (brand new as of June 1999). Women and minorities in science
In the seventeenth century, the Royal Society of London was open to just about any gentleman who could pay its dues: not only full-time researchers, like Newton and Boyle, but also those with an above-average curiosity about things scientific and mathematical, like John Dryden, poet laureate of England. A learned woman, Margaret Cavendish, the duchess of Newcastle, even attended a meeting in 1667. Sadly, this society's first woman "fellow" was not elected until 1945. While women are largely absent from learned societies and the pages of scientific journals until the early twentieth century, a few did work as technical assistants (for the most part, unpaid and unacknowledged), while still others played an important role in communicating scientific knowledge through books published in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. In the late eighteenth century, Marie-Anne Lavoisier prepared technical illustrations for her husband's chemical publications, lent a hand in his laboratory, and translated a scientific book on phlogiston. At roughly the same time, Caroline Herschel published a Catalogue of Stars under the auspices of the Royal Society of London. In fact, Herschel sighted eight new comets in her long life, three of which she reported in very brief Philosophical Transactions articles.  | | University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center | | A plate from Maria Sibylla Merian's lavishly illustrated Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium |
One could make a convincing case that Marie Curie is the first woman to publish scientific articles of major significance, thrusting her into the front ranks of important scientists worldwide. In the year 1898, aged 30, she along with her husband published two important articles, each announcing the discovery of a different radioactive element detected in the uranium ore called pitchblende. The first article reported on polonium, named after Curie's native country; and the second, radium, named from the Latin word for "ray."
Another woman physicist of importance is Lise Meitner. In 1938 Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, working in the physics department at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, split the atom of uranium. Shortly thereafter, Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch provided an explanation on why Hahn and Strassmann's bombarding uranium (atomic number of 92) with neutrons formed isotopes of barium (atomic number of 56) when an element with atomic number close to uranium was expected. To solve this problem, Meitner and Frisch applied the liquid-drop model of the nucleus first proposed by Niels Bohr. In this model, they pictured uranium as a liquid drop, which becomes unstable when hit by a neutron, elongates into a dumbbell shape, then divides into two smaller drops. This process leads to two smaller nuclei (barium and krypton), releasing considerable energy (200 million electron volts) in conformance with Einstein's famous equation E = mc². They called this process "fission," borrowing a term from biology. In the late nineteenth century, the doors of universities, scientific societies, and research laboratories gradually opened to women. As a consequence, in the twentieth century, one finds many women authors making major contributions to the scientific literature. Other groups have also been shunned from the practice of science, just as in other professions. Ernest Everett Just, one of the first prominent African-American biologists, left the United States in the early 1930s to work in Europe because he felt unappreciated and discriminated against in his native land. During his long but tumultuous career, he published about 70 scientific articles and two technical books. |
