Neuroscience-knowledge management: slow change so far

I N THE FIRST ISSUE of this journal, it was claimed that ‘even the most active nCUrOSCit?ntiSt spends more working hours in reading, reviewing and writing scientific reports than on direct experlmentai effort”. The dilemma continues today: to do or to read? In 1995, we have for example, extremely powerful research methods, Yet, the fact remains that there have been few changes to the tradltlonai methods of neuroscientific~information gathering, sharing and anaiyzlng: namely reading research lournais and traveling to scientific meetings, This stagnation in Information-handilng technology aggravates the Inescapable recognition by neuroscicntlsts that the data that they are reading or henring arc months to years behlnd the actual state of cxpcrimentai progress at the bench-tops of the fleid, Nevertheless, them appear to bc finite limits on the ability of any individuai scientist to absorb, digest and intcrprct the cxistlng studies, and to monitor, evaluate and incorporate new data into their appreciatian for a given brain region, system or questlon, The characteristic motif of ‘neuroscience’, namely the interdiscipiinary merglng of data acquired by anatomists, chemists and physiologists, working at their preferred levels of resoiutlon from the moiccuiar to the organismic, constltutcs its own major bar, ricr to substantive inteiiectuai consoiidatlon of the data. For this speclai lssuc of TINS, I wish to call attention to some changes occurring in the ways scientists are working to harness the flow of scientific data. With regard to the rhanglng patterns of neuroscientific-inh~~rmation cxchangc, recognizing the near impossibility of staying wholly abreast of develop ments in any finite sphere of the neurosciences, the past two decades have seen the emergence of several new forms of scientific exchanges, among which TINS and its sister Journals for other fields have been pace-setters. In a news magazine-like format, scientists writing for other scientists summarize frequently their views of special fields, recent meetings, and newly emerging sets of data. These, and other mtnl-review formats, offer digestible overviews of newly arising series of observations, linking them to the past status of knowledge, and sensitizing other scholars to developments yet to come, occasionally with a useful bibliography of authors and topics to track forward in tlme after their publication. Other important information-handilng advances provide methods to probe and follow the literature, Commcrciai software applications such as Colleague@, Dialog’ and PaperChase’, as well as the National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) own GratefuiMed”, offer a means to access the NLM’s coilectlon of SCI. entiflc ilterature through libraries, through one’s pCrSOnai computer using a modem connection and, more recently, through the Internet. Software packages from the lnstltute for Scientific informatlon