THE SCIENTIFIC PAPER:
FRAUDULENT OR FORMATIVE?
Richard Horton
The Lancet, 42 Bedford Sq, London WC1B 356, UK
In 1963, Peter Medawar asked whether the scientific paper was a fraud. He argued that the research article was a "travesty... which editors themselves often insist upon" because it gives "a totally misleading narrative of the processes of thought that go into the making of scientific discoveries." A paper's fraud, Medawar insisted, lay mainly in its form. The importance of the form in which research is communicated, rather than its specific content, remains a neglected area of inquiry. Roman Jakobson described 6 components of any communicative event (Hawkes T. Structuralism and Semiotics. London: Routledge, 1977).
Message
Addresser___________________________________ Addressee
Context
Contact
Code
The addresser is the author; the addressee, a reader; the message, a text's content; the context, its setting (eg, journal); the contact, its mode of delivery (eg, electronic); and the code, its language. But the roles of author, reader, language, setting, and mode of delivery-mostly issues of form-may have a more important bearing on our interpretation of a scientific paper than hitherto recognized. Form may be especially important as we adopt digital media to distribute research data (Van Alstyne M, Brynjolfsson E. Could the Internet balkanise science? Science 1996: 274:1479-80.). As research reports become even more structured and our approach to research increasingly ordered (eg, CONSORT), the non-content-related elements of a research communication could mould our interpretations in ways we have yet to explore. The scientific paper, and our understanding of it, is now entering a highly unstable period. An appreciation of the importance of form when interpreting research might lead to a reappraisal of the role of the reader in actively creating a meaning for a scientific text.
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