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How can the English-language scientific literature be made more accessible to non-native speakers?. Journals should allow greater use of referenced direct quotations in 'component-oriented' scientific writing

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Bruce Charlton

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Abstract

In scientific writing, although clarity and precision of language are vital to effective communication, it seems undeniable that content is more important than form. Potentially valuable knowledge should not be excluded from the scientific literature merely because the researchers lack advanced language skills. Given that global scientific literature is overwhelmingly in the English-language, this presents a problem for non-native speakers. My proposal is that scientists should be permitted to construct papers using a substantial number of direct quotations from the already-published scientific literature. Quotations would need to be explicitly referenced so that the original author and publication should be given full credit for creating such a useful and valid description. At the extreme, this might result in a paper consisting mainly of a 'mosaic' of quotations from the already existing scientific literature, which are linked and extended by relatively few sentences comprising new data or ideas. This model bears some conceptual relationship to the recent trend in computing science for component-based or component-oriented software engineering - in which new programs are constructed by reusing programme components, which may be available in libraries. A new functionality is constructed by linking-together many pre-existing chunks of software. I suggest that journal editors should, in their instructions to authors, explicitly allow this 'component-oriented' method of constructing scientific articles; and carefully describe how it can be accomplished in such a way that proper referencing is enforced, and full credit is allocated to the authors of the reused linguistic components. © 2007.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Charlton BG

Publication type: Editorial

Publication status: Published

Journal: Medical Hypotheses

Year: 2007

Volume: 69

Issue: 6

Pages: 1163-1164

Print publication date: 01/01/2007

ISSN (print): 0306-9877

ISSN (electronic): 1532-2777

Publisher: Churchill Livingstone

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mehy.2007.07.007

DOI: 10.1016/j.mehy.2007.07.007

PubMed id: 17706893

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