Science blog

Call yourself a scientist? Well, before 1833 that would have been a bit tricky. The word didn’t exist. Allan Sudlow delves into the Library’s science collections to discover the origin of this appellation.

As Sydney Ross sets out at the start of his 1962 essay “Scientist: The Story of a Word”:

“..the need for a new word is socially determined, right at the start, and any subsequent changes of denotation, as well as the cluster of connotations surrounding it, are also in response to demands from society.”

Annals of Science, 18 (2), p65-85 (1962).

Ross noted that the designation scientist came with a social shift in the nineteenth century away from the aspirations of established giants of the field, such as Humphrey Davy and Michael Faraday. Both owed their reputations and livelihoods to science but largely eschewed profit in preference to the pursuit of scientific research for enlightenment and public benefit. According to Ross, Faraday never referred to himself as a scientist, describing himself as an experimental philosopher to the end of his career. Ross argues that the implied professional specialism meant that the word scientist made a business of science, presenting the role as another alternative profession to physician, lawyer or clergyman.

General consensus (including the Oxford English Dictionary online entry) is that the term scientist was first used in print in 1834 in an anonymous review of Mary Somerville's On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences in the Quarterly Review.

The Rev. William Whewell, polymath and philosopher, was the author of this somewhat jocular review. He restated his thoughts on this coinage more formally a few years later:

 “As we cannot use physician for a cultivator of physics, I have called him a physicist. We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a Scientist. Thus we might say, that as an Artist is a Musician, Painter, or Poet, a Scientist is a Mathematician, Physicist or Naturalist.”

Preface to The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840).

William Whewell by J. Rylands, albumen carte-de-visite, 1860s, NPG Ax18390, under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

In this same piece, Whewell draws comparisons to derivations for others' roles including Journalist and Tobacconist, and a joke about the clergy:

“I may notice another example of the necessity of avoiding ambiguous words. A philosopher who makes method his study, would naturally be termed a Methodist; but unluckily this word is already appropriated to a religious sect.”

Debate over the word was still raging in the early part of the twentieth century, as correspondence in the letters section of a 1924 edition of Nature reveals:

“Let me therefore plead with you, Sir, who have done so much to raise the standard of the scientific literature, and with all others have striven to show that scientific and linguistic precision are not incompatible, to give us a lead in this matter. If you will not have “scientist”, at least provide us with some other single word.  Norman R. Campbell”

And the response…

“Hitherto the word “scientist” has not been used in the columns of Nature to designate a man of science or scientific worker….We, have therefore invited a number of authorities on good English, including distinguished men of science, to favour us with their opinions on the desirability, or otherwise, of adopting the word “scientist”. Editor, Nature”

Nature Vol 114 p788 (1924).

Reflecting the norms of the time, the implication here is that all scientists and people in comparable professions are men.

Source: Natural History Museum Library, London; under CC BY-NC 3.0

Whewell was a great wordsmith and renowned for coining a host of new terms relating to science. He came up with the term scientist at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Cambridge in 1833. When I took a look at the report of the meeting, I was delighted and saddened to see that among the signatures of those attending, “S.T. Coleridge, Grove, Highgate”; an entry written just over a year before Coleridge’s death.

An interesting reflection on the times when clergymen such as Whewell drew comparisons between the Arts and Sciences to define the word scientist, in the company of poets, philosophers, artists and other persons of learning.

So what does it mean to be a called a scientist today? The OED online definition of a scientist is:

“A person with expert knowledge of a science; a person using scientific methods”

Can I call myself a scientist? For several years, I was a neuroscientist/cell biologist and then involved in science funding, policy and strategy. My current role at the Library still involves both aspects of the above description, though my job title does not include the word “scientist”. Personally, I don’t mind how I am described in this professional context; I’d rather be known for what I do.

Elizabeth Newbold explains why not everything is as straightforward as it may appear for a science librarian dealing with Open Access content

It is Open Access week and sitting in an office with Anna Kinsey, the Engagement Manager for Europe PubMedCentral, Open Access has obviously been a topic of conversation. Anna has written a blog outlining some of her frustrations with Open Access. I’m not going to repeat them (I recommend reading her post) but in conversation with her it made me think about some of my own frustrations, as a librarian, dealing with free-to-access content.

A timely incident highlighted one of the frustrations we face as librarians in providing access to content. This week I had a question from a colleague, who asked “why can I access this article?” Possibly a slightly unusual question, as we are much more likely to be asked, “why can’t I access …”.and a surprising one, as it took longer to answer than we thought.

In the past, the simple response - “because we have a subscription to the journal” - is actually no longer always true or sufficient. Alternative answers, such as “because it’s open access” or “because it’s freely available” need to be considered. And in this particular case we actually needed to know why we had access, since the mode of access would determine how the reader could use the article.

We started with the first question – do we have a subscription? In this case, the answer was no, so we needed to see why we had access, which is where it started to get complicated. The obvious next thought would be is it an OA journal or OA article? In some cases this is easy to ascertain but not always! So my frustration is the lack of clear identification and consistent explanations regarding OA material. Words such as “free”, “freely available”, “free access”, “open research”, “open”, “open access” are used seemingly interchangeably – all adding to the confusion. It is especially so when we move outside the realms of STM journals and look at the ever increasing and varied amount of other freely available content. Information about the access and restrictions which apply to the material are often hidden away on web pages that are difficult to find. This week I finally found the explanation I needed on the ‘information for librarians’ page. Luckily, I’m a librarian so I looked there but would a non-librarian have found it?

This example may seem like a small issue but it highlights increasing fragmentation when we need to be able to easily and consistently identify why we can access something, otherwise we don’t know how it can be used. 

Whilst the OA symbol originally designed by the Public Library of Science has been used to good effect – wouldn’t it be nice if there was a universally accepted and adopted set of symbols to help identify Open Access material and navigate through the maze?

Those who fund UK research, including the public, should expect to know about the outputs of that work. However, as Allan Sudlow discovered, this is a complex and expensive activity that needs better co-ordination.

The UK does not currently have a national reporting infrastructure that brings together all the information on public and charity-funded research. At a high level, such a system would allow those who had access, to evaluate inputs (e.g. money, people, time) against outputs (e.g. publications, patents, data). No such unified system exists, which makes it impossible to look across different sources of funding in any detailed way to assess the impacts of the research at a national or international level. And this is ignoring the more difficult task of evaluating the longer term benefits of such research, for example identifying how investing research money, time and effort in biomedical research has led to improvements in human health.

That’s not to say people aren’t trying. In fact, a large number of people employed by organisations that receive public funding for research, e.g. universities, are working to bring together all the information on their institute’s research spend and outputs for reporting and evaluation. Similarly, the UK Government , UK Research Councils, research universities, institutes and a huge number of different charities, foundations and trusts, have invested in IT systems and people to do just the same. A big driver for much of this activity across UK universities is the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF), which in 2014 will evaluate the research outputs and impacts arising from all government-funded higher education institutes across the UK.

Until fairly recently however, this investment in IT systems and people has not been co-ordinated. Thus, research organisations across the UK are at different levels of maturity in managing research information. Some larger organisations have invested in commercial systems such as ResearchFish. Others have developed in-house systems to facilitate the gathering of information, particularly smaller organisations with limited resources, many of whom still rely on storing data in spread sheets and preparing information by hand. This has inevitably resulted in duplication and increased costs due to inefficiency across the sector as a whole.

What's the measure? Copyright Photos.com.

So why isn’t it all coalescing into a single dedicated system for research evaluation? Well aside from the many different motivations for developing research information systems, layer on to this the complexities of all the different stakeholder views. For example, beyond a simple agreement of “we need to gather information on X”, there then needs to be agreement on what exactly can and should be measured, how often, for how long, in what format and structure, etc, etc.

Having said all that, there are a range of projects and developments that are attempting to bring some coherence to the world of research reporting. Some of this is happening by default, as organisations begin to use the same IT systems, and some of it is being led top-down by UK Government projects such as Gateway to Research which attempt to provide some level of visibility and access to research information to people outside of the academic research community.

In a bottom-up approach, I am involved in a JISC-funded feasibility study called UK Research Information Shared Service: UKRISS. This project has examined the motivations and needs of those involved in research reporting alongside an analysis of the current landscape of research information systems and standards. Our aim is to define an approach (based on a common research information format called CERIF) to allow better research information sharing and benchmarking across different organisations which are already using different systems. A small attempt to tackle what remains a big challenge.

Allan Sudlow

Libraries just worry about books, right? Wrong! We also worry about data. If you want to provide a useful service to the research community (and that community includes anyone who wants to do research), you need to think about all the information, including research data sets, that people may need. But we recognise that isn’t always easy to do.

The Royal Society’s 2012 report on science as an open enterprise focused on the value of research data and, at a recent meeting, Professor Geoffrey Boulton who led the study noted that ‘open science’ approaches are not new. Henry Oldenburg, the 17th-century German natural philosopher and first Secretary of the Royal Society, ensured all his scientific correspondence was written in vernacular (and not Latin, as was the norm), and that all his observations were supported by supplementary evidence (and not just assertions).

Thus Boulton reflected that while the value of supporting reproducibility and providing an evidence base had been recognised very early on, many journals no longer published the results in tandem with the underlying data. Fortunately the technology is now allowing many publishers and others to provide better access to the data.

In some areas of science there has been a culture of data sharing. If researchers are sequencing DNA from any species they are asked to submit it to GenBank: a database established to ensure that scientists have access to the most up-to-date and comprehensive DNA sequence information. Most publishers require the researchers to provide evidence that they have added their data to GenBank before publication. So, if you work on sequencing DNA, getting access to other people’s data is relatively easy – but that is not necessarily the case for many other areas of science.

The reasons are complex. In many areas of research, there are no established or permanent stores for the many types of data that are produced. For researchers, the data they collect or generate is the primary output of the research and therefore comprises their intellectual capital. Many researchers are concerned about receiving appropriate credit for their efforts and that may not happen if they share their data with all and sundry. But that objection could be tackled if researchers could cite data – and thereby be recognised for their contribution.

The British Library is a founding member of an organisation called DataCite which, as the name suggests, was established to enable data to be cited. We have been working with a range of organisations responsible for managing, storing and preserving data from a variety of areas – everything from archaeology to atmospheric science – to enable them to attach a ‘digital tag’ to data that allows it to be referenced. This tag is ‘persistent’, so that even if the data is no longer available, it will be possible to find out what has happened to that resource. We hope when someone says – ‘show me the data’ – we will have played a role in making that possible.

Lee-Ann Coleman and Allan Sudlow

From organising a public debate to writing-up science conferences and festivals, my time as part of the science team at the British Library is at an end. My placement followed on from first BBSRC intern, Catriona Manville who became the ‘poster-girl’ for the BBSRC placement programme in 2012. Even though it was never really a competition, after three months at the British Library could I be the next BBSRC ‘poster-boy’?

Stuart [me], surveying a grazing exclosure on the Beinn Eighe nature reserve in Scotland. Photo by Kyle Munro.

Before my internship I was writing-up my PhD thesis in Biological Science at the University of Aberdeen, but I wanted some experience in science policy. A placement at the British Library was appealing as an intermediary between interacting with policy makers and the general public. To that effect, I have attended as many meetings, workshops, conferences as possible; from the British Science Association Science Communication conference to a day talking to MPs at the House of Commons with the Society of Biology. For many of the events I attended, I wrote articles or blog posts to share what I learned. For example, I attended my first ever festival (and kept my wristband to prove it!) - the Cheltenham Science Festival - and helped write an article in their newspaper, Litmus paper.

Spot Stuart during TalkScience@BL ‘Pollinators and pesticides: is there a plan bee?’ Photo: Peter Warner.

The pinnacle of the placement has been organising TalkScience. This is a quarterly evening event, similar in format to a café scientifique. After reading the news, policy briefings, publications and reports, we decided our next TalkScience topic would be on issues surrounding the potentially harmful effect of pesticides on insect pollinators. “Pollinators and pesticides: is there a plan bee?”  was chaired by Bill Turnbull, BBC presenter and beekeeper in discussion with the panel comprising Dr David Aston (British Beekeepers Association), Dr Peter Campbell (Syngenta) and Dr Lynn Dicks (University of Cambridge). Even greater public outreach was gained via Bill hosting a BBC Horizon programme about demystifying the bees - leading to the event being filmed by the BBC. Keep your eyes peeled on BBC2 on 2 August at 21.00 and you might see a few shots of the event!

Being part of the British Library science team was a large learning curve and has increased my awareness of activities supporting, using and extending scientific research. For example, I gained new insights into Open Access and how recent policy changes are influencing libraries, funders, publishers and researchers. Even on a day-to-day basis, the transition from PhD student to science outreach is a change in mind-set and routine.

•    Preparing for a monthly supervisor meeting to participating in daily meetings with a wide range of people
•    Preparing for a single yearly conference to attending a conference every few weeks
•    Focusing on a single specific area of science to following multiple disciplines
•    Expanding sources of information from primarily research articles to journal and society news, policy briefings and blogs/Twitter!

A typical internship job at the British Library; fixing the life support system in the office to stop rising CO2 concentration killing the team! This was a team away day at the Leicester Space Centre.

Should I become the next ‘poster-boy’? To be honest, as a PhD student, I feel lucky to have experienced my fair share of media engagement with BBC Horizon. There are many scientists, societies and government advisors completely immersed in outreach and policy that deserve more recognition. Undertaking a placement at the British Library has been a rewarding experience in itself and I would encourage future PhD students to consider the opportunity.

Stuart Smith is a PhD student studing the effect of livestock grazing on the carbon cycle at the University of Aberdeen and has finished his internship as part of the BBSRC policy placement scheme.