The Scientific Literature: A Guided Tour

by Joseph E. Harmon (Commentary), Alan G. Gross (Commentary)

The scientific article has been a hallmark of the career of every important western scientist since the seventeenth century. Yet its role in the history of science has not been fully explored. Joseph E. Harmon and Alan G. Gross remedy this oversight with The Scientific Literature , a collection of writings—excerpts from scientific articles, letters, memoirs, proceedings, transactions, and magazines—that illustrates the origin of the scientific article in 1665 and its evolution over the next three and a half centuries.

Featuring articles—as well as sixty tables and illustrations, tools vital to scientific communication—that represent the broad sweep of modern science, The Scientific Literature is a historical tour through both the rhetorical strategies that scientists employ to share their discoveries and the methods that scientists use to argue claims of new knowledge. Commentaries that explain each excerpt’s scientific and historical context and analyze its communication strategy accompany each entry.

A unique anthology, The Scientific Literature will allow both the scholar and the general reader to experience first hand the development of modern science.

312 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2007

Reviews

[Erick Gallun · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a wonderful book filled with examples of the evolution of the ways in which scientists communicate with each other. The change in framing the endeavor from "I did this thing" to "This hypothesis was examined" is elegantly mapped. Very informative of how much of the very fabric of our science is created by how we write about what we do.