Our cannabis aroma paper in PLoS ONE has now been viewed over 4,000 times and downloaded more than 600 times since February. It’s gratifying to see so many people interested in a new research theme. And yet, because web-based metrics are automated, impersonal counters, I don’t have a clue who these people are. It hasn’t always been this way.
When I was in graduate school in the pre-internet age, the super-efficient way to scan the new scientific literature was to grab a physical copy of Current Contents, the weekly publication of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). It was a thick little booklet, printed on thin, bright white paper. At least it was bright white when it arrived in the mail and when your lab head got to leaf through it. By the time it reached the grad students’ offices, it was tattered, marked up, and usually stained with coffee, cheesesteak drippings, and rat urine.
Current Contents listed the contents of the life sciences journals published that week, along with author names and addresses. This enabled you to request a physical reprint of the paper by mailing a letter or postcard. Better funded departments had pre-printed postcards for this purpose. Really well-funded labs signed up for ISI’s pre-printed Request-A-Print® cards—they came with a peel-off return address sticker for the reprint sender’s convenience. But you still had to fill in by hand the citation and the author’s address.
Although it beat going to the library and physically browsing recent, unbound issues of your favorite journals, this process was labor intensive. As a result, it made you think twice about the article in question: was it truly worth the effort of requesting your own personal copy? How many of us today download papers on a whim, only to have them stack up, unread, in our “worth a look” folder?
On the flip side, receiving reprint requests in the mail was a rewarding experience, especially for a graduate student or newly minted faculty member. It meant someone had found your work sufficiently interesting to fill out the postcard. And you knew who they were! A reprint request from a Big Name in the Field was acknowledgment that you had arrived.
Reprint requests also brought a sense of connectedness with scientists around the world. The mail would bring postcards with bright stamps and formal, cursive handwriting. The ones from communist block countries like East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia were sad: printed on pulpy, low quality paper that oxidized in the sunlight and had a bitter smell. I always enjoyed fulfilling these requests—it meant acknowledging these scientists, keeping them connected to the free world, and encouraging freedom of inquiry.
1 comment:
Oh yes ! Happy days of innocent belief that the way to get on in science was to do good science. The way to get lots of requests was to publish in a slightly obscure journal that few libraries subscribed to. The international connectedness highlight that sticks in my head was a request from Cuba when I was working in South Africa at a time when mail was routinely intercepted. I do not know whether they ever got the reprint.
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