About
Reflections on Papers Past is a collection of back-stories and recollections about famous scientific papers in ecology, evolution, behaviour and conservation.
The personal back-story of this project can be found here.
Background to the project
Writing scientific papers is, arguably, the most important task in a scientist’s professional life. Papers, after all, are the universal currency by which scientists are compared and evaluated. While there is much debate on what metrics to use to evaluate a scientist’s publication record, there is little disagreement on the importance of publications itself. Given the size of academia today and the demands on their time, papers are often the only way in which scientists communicate their research findings. These papers, in turn, form the building blocks of research by other scientists. In addition, papers serve as raw material for science journalists, science historians and for textbooks of science. For most scientists, papers will be the only scientific legacies they leave behind.
Unfortunately, scientific papers are unsatisfactory as records of science in practice. As Peter Medawar argued in a talk provocatively titled “Is the scientific paper a fraud?” the scientific paper “misrepresents the processes of thought that accompanied or give rise to the work that is described in the paper” (Medawar 1963). As all scientists know from their own experience, doing science involves serendipity, failure, mistakes, luck, long bouts of stasis, bursts of creativity and changes of direction. Papers present a cleaned-up, simplified and reorganized version of this messy scientific process, leaving out any detail that might distract the reader from understanding the paper’s finding and its logical argument. In addition, although a paper is “true” when it is published, its truth diminishes with time, as new knowledge emerges that questions and contradicts its claims. Yet, a paper itself is a permanent record whose content is never updated to reflect post-publication developments. At the same time, a paper, once published, can take on entirely new, unintended and possibly erroneous meaning when it is cited by other papers. One could say that words are put in its mouth.
With this motivation in mind, the Reflections on Papers Past oral history project was initiated in 2016, to archive the back-stories of famous papers in Ecology, Evolution, Behaviour and Conservation, as well as the authors’ reflections on their impact, validity and relevance today. Famous here implies papers that have either been highly-cited or become text-book examples or have been recognised in some fashion, e.g. through an award. As of 1 February 2024, 154 interviews have been conducted, each anchored around a single scientific paper. Since interviewees were from all over the world, interviews were usually conducted online via Skype.
This website, in addition to providing the full interviews, uses material from the interviews in the form of three exhibits:
- Thematic collections of quotes that showcase the human stories behind scientific papers;
- An archive of photos and other visuals connected to the back-stores of papers;
- Papers annotated with author reflections.
An earlier version of this website, which contains only the full interviews, can be found here: https://reflectionsonpaperspast.wordpress.com/
Credits
Individuals
- Hari Sridhar (conducting and editing interviews; website concept and design)
- Joyshree Chanam (website concept & design; research assistance; editing interviews)
- Priyanka Hari Haran (research assistance)
- Vidyadhar Atkore & Seth Barribeau (advice/inspiration)
Institutes*
- Konrad Lorenz Institute, Klosterneuburg (February 2020; October 2022-)
- Archives at NCBS, Bengaluru (August 2019 – )
- Zukunftskolleg, Konstanz (November-December 2021)
- Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag), Kastanienbaum, Switzerland (January 2020)
- German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), Leipzig (November 2019)
- Wildlife Programme, National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru (August 2019- July 2020)
- Vishwesha Guttal’s Lab, Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru (January 2015- June 2019; supported for 3 years through an Indian National Science Academy grant)
- Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin (March 2018)
- Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (September 2013- March 2014)