Presidential Address: Truth and error in scientific publishing

The style of a journal paper follows a typical stylised form. It always has a title, a list of authors, their affiliations, and an abstract. Typically, papers have a length of 3 000 to 10 000 words. However, there have to be those who take things to the extreme. Among the contenders for the longest title of a research paper is ’The nucleotide sequence of a 3.2 kb segment of mitochondrial maxicircle DNA from Crithidia fasciculata containing the gene for cytochrome oxidase subunit III, the N-terminal part of the apocytochrome b gene and a possible frameshift gene; further evidence for the use of unusual initiator triplets in trypanosome mitochondria’ (Sloof et al., 1987). A physics paper with 5154 authors (Aad et al., 2015) broke the record for the largest number of contributors to a single research article. This paper presents collaborative work done at the Large Hadron Collider to determine the most precise estimate yet of the mass of the Higgs boson. The 33page article in Physical Review Letters devotes nine pages to describing the research itself (including references) and 24 pages to listing the authors and their institutions (Castelvecchi, 2015). More refreshing in style is the following example of a paper (Berry et al., 2011) with a very short abstract: Title: Can apparent superluminal neutrino speeds be explained as a quantum weak measurement? Abstract: Probably not. The shortest paper (Upper, 1974) is entitled The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of “writer‘s block”; it contains no words at all in the body of the paper. The published review of the paper said: ‘I have studied this manuscript very carefully with lemon juice and X-rays and have not detected a single flaw in either design or writing style. I suggest it be published without revision. Clearly it is the most concise manuscript I have ever seen—yet it contains sufficient detail to allow other investigators to replicate Dr. Upper's failure. In comparison with the other manuscripts I get from you containing all that complicated detail, this one was a pleasure to examine. Surely we can find a place for this paper in the Journal—perhaps on the edge of a blank page.’