Crisis of Communication

Abstract

In 1963, at the end of his 20-year tenure as Editor of The Lancet, Theodore “Robbie” Fox gave a series of three lectures at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The transcripts of those lectures were published as a book entitled Crisis in Communication: The Functions and Future of Medical Journals two years later. In the book, Fox makes a stark prediction: “A day will come when journals will be superseded as a means of publishing new research.” (FOX, 1965). As the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s publication draws near, it is worth reassessing Fox’s prediction. Will journals be superseded 50 years from now? At first glance that seems unlikely. The first scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions, was published in 1665. Three centuries later, when Fox wrote Crisis in Communication, there were 6,000 medical journals in existence. Now, Scopus, one of the largest indexes of scholarly output, includes around 21,000 journals in its database: it has indexed 21 million articles published between 1823 and 1996, and a further 33 million records published within the last two decades. Indeed, according to a recent analysis, scientific output continues to increase by around 8-9% per year (BORNMANN; MUTZ, 2014). This increase in the number of articles is often at the expense of quality, with many papers never being cited. According to one estimate, as many as 12% of papers in the clinical sciences, and 27% of papers in the life sciences, are not cited within 5 years of publication (REMLER, 2014). The drivers for this are clear — academics feel pressured to publish as many papers as possible in order to get tenure and to secure new research funding. Furthermore, the huge volumes of papers being published also puts pressure on the academic community in other ways: readers are struggling to keep up with the literature; and many journals are finding it increasingly hard to secure the services of qualified peer reviewers to judge the suitability of papers for publication. The process of doing science is also changing. Not so long ago, single-author papers were considered to be essential for career advancement, as they demonstrated the ability to do research independently. More recently, large-scale collaborations are the order of the day, with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of researchers collaborating on expensive, international scientific studies. Jim Gray, a computer scientist, identified this shift in the scientific method calling it ‘the fourth paradigm’. In his words (GRAY, 2007, p. xix):