Telling science’s stories
Every biologist has been frustrated by an inability to find a specific piece of information in the literature. You are planning an experiment and you want to know whether factor X modifies the cellular response to factor Y. How do you find this information? Reference books and review articles are little help because most are supremely superficial, and any specific information they might contain is hopelessly out of date (not to mention the problem with constantly changing biological nomenclature). Online searching is only useful if the data you are looking for happens to be in the title or abstract. Unless what you’re looking for is the main subject of the paper, perusing the literature is almost hopeless. So what’s the best way to find biological information? The universal struggle that biologists undergo to find information in published papers indicates that the literature is not the actual repository of most biological knowledge. Most useful information, it seems, is not actually written down, but is passed orally between investigators. In other words, the best way to find biological information is to talk to other scientists.
- Research Organization:
- Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-76RL01830
- OSTI ID:
- 922163
- Report Number(s):
- PNNL-SA-58288; KP1504020; TRN: US200803%%199
- Journal Information:
- The Scientist, 22(1):27, Vol. 22, Issue 1
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Technology Gap Analysis for the Detection of Process Signatures Using Less Than Remote Methods
Crystal Ball: A Naturalist Perspective of Microbiology: Examples from Methanogenic Archaea