English 5390: Writing for Publication Weekly Blog Post - Introduction or Conclusion

Question: Write either a first draft or revised draft of your introduction paragraph or conclusion paragraph for your article. Be sure to answer the question: what does my work contribute to the scholarship?

Here is my Introduction as it stands today.

Imagine reading the following in a scientific publication:

Mr. Kingzett says, ‘There is no known process of slow oxidation which has been established to produce ozone.’ Couched as it is, in such positive terms, this assertion contravenes the statements of those who have experimentally investigated the subject during the past forty years. It might, therefore, not unreasonably be anticipated that Mr. Kingzett should bring forward some new and crucial experiments of his own. He adduces none. At the same time, he fails to recognise certain distinguishing properties of ozone and hydrogen peroxide, and apparently is not conversant with many phenomena exhibited in the oxidation of phosphorous in moist air (Leeds, 1883)

What would you do? How would you respond? Can you even imagine something like that being published in a modern scientific journal in an article and not an opinion piece? I can’t. In fact, I can almost guarantee at some point before publication this would have seen a request from the Editor of the journal to soften the statement and ease the wording. Yet, this was published, 128 years ago. It seems to fly in the face of modern scientific writing, which Marie-Claude Roland describes as being “withdrawn” (Roland, 2009). She states that “they now appear as shunning responsibility, being just tentative, too polite to criticize research by others, eventually relying on writing practices that verge on fraud” (Roland, 2009). The difference in the way authors wrote then and wrote now implies a difference in the scientific ethos or, if not in the scientific ethos itself, in how that ethos is exhibited.

The scientific ethos has been defined as having several parts: universalism, communality, disinterestedness, organized skepticism, originality, and humility (Prelli, 1989). Of these, this article will primarily address the concept of disinterestedness, which “requires that scientists strive to achieve their self-interests only through satisfaction in work done and prestige accrued through serving the scientific community,” and organized skepticism, which “mandates that scientists temporarily suspend judgment in order to scrutinize beliefs critically against empirical and logical criteria of judgment” (Prelli, 1989, p. 49). To prove their integration into this scientific ethos, modern researchers avoid the use of personal pronouns, such as “I”, “me”, “mine”, and to prove their results to skeptics, they provide copious quantities of evidence for their results in the form of graphics, references, and even additional data published online. But was this always the case? Or has the presentation of the scientific ethos changed over the years?

In this article, I seek those answers by looking at a selection of papers from the Journal of the American Chemical Society that were published in approximately 40 year increments, starting in the 1880s and ending up in the 2000s. The difference between those 1880s papers and the modern papers, those from the 2000s, is striking. The modern papers are, in a way, presented in a manner that appears to be much less personal to the authors than they appeared to be in the 1880s. Papers written in the 1880s include the pronoun “I”, often associated with a statement of interest in the work. In the 1920s and 1960s, authors moved away from the use of pronouns and even on single-author papers did not use “I”, and although the pronouns “we” and “our” were found in the examples from 2000s, they were not attached to statements of interest in the work.
In addition, modern papers have much larger reference sets and much more supporting data than the oldest papers. This emphasis on data presentation and references may be the result of better technology and a larger body of work to cite, but one must ask if our feisty 1880s authors would have felt the need to use them had they been available. For example, Albert Leeds draws on his own personal experience with a compound, stating, “Now, the property of ozone that is most strikingly characteristic, is its smell. This smell, so far as long-continued familiarity with it enables me to judge…The solutions which I have prepared at different times myself…” (emphasis added) (Leeds, 1883). Nothing like this appears in the modern works. Modern authors would have felt the need to cite other sources for this information, instead of citing personal experience and admitting involvement in the work.

Works Cited

Leeds, A. R. (1883). Peroxide of hydrogen and ozone. Journal of the American Chemical Society , 5, 10-16. Prelli, L. J. (1989). The rhetorical construction of the scientific ethos. In H. W. Simons (Ed.), Rhetoric in the Human Sciences (pp. 48-68). London, U.K.: Sage Publications, Ltd. Roland, M.-C. (2009). Quality and integrity in scientific writing: prerequisites for quality in science communication. Journal of Science Communication , 8 (2), A04.