How to Read Coronavirus Studies Like a Scientist

Carl Zimmer, "How to Read Coronavirus Studies Like a Scientist." New York Times, Jun 2, 2020, p. D7.

     The National Library of Medicine's Database at the start of June contains over 17,000 published papers about he new coronavirus.  A website called bioRxiv, which hosts studies that have yet to go through peer review, contains over 4,000 papers.
     In earlier times, few people aside from scientists would have laid eyes on these papers.  Months or years after they were written, they'd wind up in printed journals tucked away on a library shelf.  But now the world can surf the rising tide of research on the new coronavirus. The vast majority of papers about it can be read free online.
     But just because scientific papers are easier to get hold of doesn't mean that they are easier to make sense of.  Reading them can be a challenge for the layperson, even one with some science education.  It's not just the jargon that scientists use to compress a lot of results into a small space. Just like sonnets, sagas and short stories, scientific papers are a genre with its own unwritten rules, rules that have developed over generations. 

COMMENT

   This article offers a variation of the library "dusty shelves" with unread articles tucked away until they were rescued by online distribution. Many publishers have made COVID-19 studies open-access, but in fact there are usually paywalls between laypeople and scientific journal  literature.   The article offers helpful advice for how to approach scientific literature.  The article mentions NLM databases and a medical pre-print archive.  Medical information has its own unique information system because it can be so urgent for doctors and public health agencies to have up-to-date research. 

Branching Out

Nalini Nadkarni. "Branching Out," in Nature Love Medicine: Essays on Wildness and Wellness. ed. by Thomas Lowe Fleischner, 2017, pp. 27-40.

                Although immense amounts of knowledge are contained in the science libraries around the world, rates of deforestation, climate change, species invasion, and over-consumption if tree-derived products are increasing.  Humans— especially those living in urban environments and working in windowless cubicles— are more and more separated from their connections to trees, soils and wind.  Midway into my academic career, I realized that communication of all my scientific findings to scientists — through my academic papers and talks at ecology conferences —did very little to fulfill my childhood dream of being a grownup who protected trees. [p. 31]

COMMENT

 The fact that so much academic writing has no market has misled some academic librarians into misunderstanding the motivation and interests of academic authors. Often, academic writing is an indirect path to the rewards of scholarly reputation, job promotion and successful grant applications, valued according to citation statistics. Some librarians therefore assume that scholars only care about reputation. However, in this case Nadkarni has a much larger goal. She wants her writing to create change in the world. This ambition places her squarely into an academic no-man’s-land between science and activism.

      There has long been an ongoing debate among scientists regarding the role of activism in the sciences and where to place appropriate limits. In his classic textbook, Fundamentals of Ecology (1953), Eugene Odum hoped that ecology would emerge as an  interdisciplinary bridge between science and society.  Instead what happened is the vocabulary shifted.  "Ecology" became more scientifically focused and integrated in Biology departments. The term “environmentalism” gained favor to imply ecological activism. In the academic environment, biological scientists criticized environmental studies as  being a “church of the environment” for idealistic students.  Eventually, the word “environmentalism” was deemed too narrow and after the Brundtland Report (1987) it was replaced by the word “sustainability." Sustainability was defined by a triple bottom line of ecology, economics and society, an attempt to deliberately pull science and society back together.  However, once again scientists balked at the fuzziness of social science and policy. The ideas of sustainable development, criticized as insufficiently evidence-based, spun off  “sustainability science” on the one hand and “resilience” on the other.  And so it goes.  As each new term becomes “tainted” by association with activism, scientists imagine that the next effort to save the planet will succeed due to rigorous standards of objectivity.

     In the end, Nadkarni was not able to create change within the context of pure science. Instead she engaged with humanities by inviting “forest novices” to help interpret what she was seeing —  artists, dancers, musicians, and indigenous people from the Arctic who have never seen a tree.  

 

     Academic librarians like to structure collections and organizations to mirror the structure of  academic departments at a university, but that means libraries are bound by the same limitations. Interdisciplinary ideas can end up marginalized, or caught in a tug-of-war of words and definitions. I wonder how many of the science libraries that have Nadkarni’s academic papers also have a video of the dance performance inspired by her work?

Six Degrees

Mark Lynas. Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. National Geographic. 2004. 

I had already begun to sift through the latest scientific literature on global warming. I knew from earlier research on High Tide that scientists have now made hundreds of projections— mostly based on complex computer models— of how future global warming will affect everything from corn crops in Tanzania to snowfall in the Alps. Occasionally a particularly striking study makes headlines in the newspapers, but the vast majority of these forecasts are burred in obscure specialist journals, destined to be read only by other climatologists. Most of these journals are taken by Oxford University’s Radcliffe Science Library where they sit—undisturbed for weeks or even years on their dimly lit shelves— just a mile or so down the road from my own house. I realized that it was almost as if I had a Delphic Oracle in my back garden or Nostradamus living next door— except that these scientific prophesies were already coming true. 

Earlier that year I had begun to make a daily pilgrimage down to the Radcliffe Science Library basement with my laptop, where as the weeks passed by I trawled through tens of thousands of scientific papers. Season came and went and I barely noticed. Each relevant article, I slotted into a spreadsheet—papers about two degrees of global warming went into the two-degree slot , papers about five degrees of global warming went into the five-degree slot, and so on. Not all were computer model projections— some of the most interesting material came from plaeoclimate studies, investigations of how variations in temperatures have affected the planet during previous global-warming events in prehistory. These records of past greenhouse episodes, I realized, could be analogs for the future; they, too, slotted into my six-degrees table according to the temperatures of the climatic period they represented. 

At the end I found I had something truly unique: a degree-by-degree guide to our planet’s future. 

COMMENT 

     This anecdote describes extreme research — a kind that few librarians imagine in any of our information literacy models. Lynas' goal is to construct an idiosyncratic index of scholarly journal articles based on their relation to global climate change. In order to do this he has become a library super-user, sorting through tens of thousands of scholarly articles (the final book lists 300 citations).  Because of the huge number and the reference to his laptop, I assume that at least some of the “shelves” he refers to are metaphorical. He certainly must have used electronic search engines to locate articles and save the most interesting ones for a closer read. 

     Lynas supposes that few other people read these journals. If that’s true his oracle is highly vulnerable to library budget cuts. The project scope depends upon having access to the enormous set of  shared resources in a large science library. Paying even fairly small access fees for so many articles could make the project cost prohibitive and the time lag to wait for thousands of articles “on-demand” would vastly extend the time needed to write the book.  It would probably also trigger some kind of backlash from librarians.

      More than once I've seen librarian colleagues act disdainful towards super-users like Lynas whom they accuse of taking up more than their “fair share” of library resources. Obviously, that could only be true when library resources are privatized through policies like inter-library loan or purchase-on- demand which provide a single copy for a single user. Ironically, these policies are enacted on the theory that it is cheaper to buy obscure articles than it is to store "undisturbed" journals. 

 If the Radcliffe Science Library was keeping track of journal use, the librarians might have noticed a sudden upswing of interest in climate science even though the heavy use of journal articles on the topic actually represents a single researcher writing a single ambitious book. The book sold well, though, so the project had a cascading effect distributing information far more widely than the direct audience of scholars.  It might even be said that the library collection subsidized a much broader sharing of public knowledge about the effects of  climate change. In that sense, use statistics would actually vastly underestimate the impact of the articles.