Ways of organizing and presenting scientific information continue to evolve, as can be seen in the Royal Chemical Society's Visual Elements Periodic Table.

The first scientific articles are typically brief reports (seldom more than 10 pages, sometimes a single paragraph) describing an individual's encounter with nature through observation and experiment. Particularly in England, they tend to be a run of Baconian "facts" woven into a narrative loosely connected, if at all, with an explanatory theory. In general, they seek to establish credibility by means of reliable testimony more than painstaking technical details, and by qualitative experience more than quantitative experiment and observation in support of theory. The early articles also largely rely on everyday language and are written in a style conforming to the compositional norms of expository prose generally, not norms specific to science. For the most part, the targeted audience is a loosely knit community of amateurs and professionals united by a curiosity about how nature works. The modern scientific article, in contrast, has evolved a specialized language and prose style adapted for efficient communication to other professionals engaged in similar research. The impersonal style of these articles is designed to focus the reader's mind on the things of the laboratory and the natural world, rather than to draw attention to the text itself or its author.

Presentational features
The presentational features of the scientific article have evolved in two primary ways. First is development of a more uniform and regimented arrangement of the article's overall content. This arrangement represents a tribute to the efficacy of the scientific method as a means of exploring nature. To that end, the modern scientific article is typically divided into an introduction, which places readers in the scientific context in which its authors are working, a section on methods and materials that outlines the procedures used, a section on results that displays the data generated and the intellectual context of their acquisition, a discussion section that interprets the data and addresses future research that would extend the present insights, and a conclusion that reiterates the central argument in a single paragraph or two and brings the main body to a close.

The scientific article has also evolved a master finding and organizing system. This system compartmentalizes the essential features in articles through the use of summaries and abstracts, headings and subheadings, tables and figures integrated into the text, citations that supply context for statements at any point in the text, and so forth. This system permits scientists to read articles opportunistically rather than sequentially, scanning the various sections in search of useful bits of method, theory, and fact.

The latter half of the twentieth century has seen a great flowering of scientific style guides and manuals, which have codified presentational as well as stylistic features in the scientific article and contributed to its growing uniformity across national boundaries and disciplines.

Visual displays

University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center

Torbern Bergman's table was an early attempt to represent chemical equations.

At the origin of the scientific article in 1665, several types of visual representation had already reached maturity: tables of data had long been a staple of the astronomical literature; three-dimensional drawings of anatomical features had attained a high level of technical detail and artistry, as shown by the graphics in the work of Vesalius and Leonardo da Vinci; map making of the earth and heavens was a long-standing enterprise; and geometric diagrams had been around since Euclid. Moreover, illustrations of flora and fauna, as in Hooke's Micrographia, were on a par with anything produced by graphic artists today. Nonetheless, illustrations and tables are relatively scarce into the nineteenth centuries, in part because of the expense involved in reproduction. It is not uncommon to find, for example, all the illustrations for an annual volume of a journal isolated in a slim section at the end. The graph, invented in the late eighteenth century, revealed the power of visualizations for conveying masses of data at a glance and uncovering data trends. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scientists have invented many other new forms of scientific visualization, some of them requiring highly specialized decoding abilities on the part of the intended audience. Because of their utility for creating and communicating science, combined with advances in photographic reproduction and computer technology, visual representations now play a central role in the scientific article.

The languages of science

	Discussion
	Is there still a role for amateur scientists? Over the past three centuries, specialization has brought higher standards and a more rigorous approach to scientific inquiry. But is there still a place for the amateur scientist? Should there be?

English, French and Latin were the dominant languages of the scientific article in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Despite the important contributions by natural philosophers throughout Europe, the fact remains that the work by investigators in countries like Italy, Spain, Denmark, Russia, and Sweden, though often published in their respective vernaculars, was usually communicated to Europe, and to the world, in one of the three major languages of science. Moreover, the two centers of scientific activity during this early period, England and France, greatly preferred publication in the vernacular over Latin, reflecting "a decisive switch from dry and bloodless scholastic erudition toward a mixed scientific/technological literature based upon the experience of the artisan, the practitioner, the traveler" (H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry, 1994). With the emergence of the German states as a center of eighteenth-century research, German became a major language of science along with English and French.

In the twentieth century, as science has become a global phenomenon, scientific articles in Chinese, Japanese, and Russian also have become prominent. Nonetheless, at no other time in the long history of the scientific article has one language, what the linguist M. A. K. Halliday aptly calls "scientific English," so dominated this genre. The most-significant journals of science, whatever their nationality, now publish in English. Even the French Académie des Sciences in its Comptes rendus has turned to publishing summaries and whole articles in English. It is no accident that, when the National Research Council of Japan launched several new specialized journals in the 1920s, they chose English to reach the widest possible international audience.

What's next?

Now, in the 20th century, we look forward to applying electronic technology to scientific communication. Certainly the editors and scientists who started this whole process more than 300 years ago would be astounded at the scope of the worldwide scientific endeavor. But I doubt that they would have any difficulty recognizing the basically similar characteristics of the system they started.

--Eugene Garfield
Current Contents (February 25, 1980)

Founded in 1895, The Astrophysical Journal now publishes an electronic edition that provides articles in HTML and PDF formats.

The scientific article is in the midst of a radical transformation spurred by advances in computer technology, in particular, word processing and graphics software, electronic mail, and the World Wide Web. This technology is changing the way in which the scientific manuscript is prepared by authors, put through peer review, produced in final form, distributed to interested readers, and perused by those readers. At the research fronts of fast-moving fields like particle physics, this shift is well on its way: scientific articles published in hardcopy periodicals are already yesterday's news. The next century, what Steven Harnad calls the "post-Gutenberg era," may very well witness the extinction of the original scientific "paper" appearing on paper. And the long-term effect of electronic preparation and publication of manuscripts may be as profound as when the scientific article evolved from scholarly letter writing and books in the seventeenth century.

Nature posted the results of the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium online, free to the public.

Take, for example, the initial results of the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, posted online in February 2001. For publication of this instant classic, Nature magazine suspended its usual practice of allowing only subscribers access to its electronic contents, and released it to the public. We suspect this article holds the record for the longest ever published by Nature magazine (62 pages), where articles seldom exceed four or five pages. Its decoding of the 3.2 billion letters in the DNA of the human genome is the work of 20 laboratories and more than 250 scientists and computer experts around the world. The consortium's most surprising finding (though very tentative) was that the human genome has 30,000-40,000 protein-encoding genes--a far cry from the more than 100,000 previously estimated. Indeed, this number is not all that much higher than less complex forms of life like fruit flies (13,000), microscopic round worms (19,000), and mustard weeds (26,000).

This long article ends by echoing the first sentence in the next to last paragraph of Watson and Crick's famous DNA article from the 1953 issue of Nature: "Finally, it is has not escaped our notice that the more we learn about the human genome, the more there is to explore" (italics indicate repetition of wording between the two articles). That sentence is followed by an apt quotation from T. S. Eliot's "Four Quartets":

We shall not cease from exploration.
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started,
And know the place for the first time.