What all budding Scientists must know...

Being a controlling perfectionist, I have a disdain for older editions of books when newer editions are available. I just did not want anything less than the best. But I never full appreciated why newer editions of certain books keep appearing, whilst for others, they stop at edition one.

I finally saw the significance of updating your editions, especially when it's no longer relevant to the current society. I picked up the 5th edition of R. A. Day's "How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper". I blogged about the 1st edition in March. It's amazing but the preface is different and the reason why this 5th edition, published in 1998, is so important is because of the internet age, where online journals are now available, something the previous generation of Scientists never had. :)

I am glad I captured the 1st edition preface.

I found in the preface, what is of utmost importance to all people wanting to be scientists or plan to go into the academia line. It is something I never knew as a child and had the ambition of wanting to go into research.

"The goal of scientific research is publication. Scientists, starting as graduate students, are measured primarily not by their dexterity in laboratory manipulations, not by their innate knowledge of either broad or narrow scientific subjects, and certainly not by their wit or charm; they are measured, and become known (or remain unknown) by their publications.

A scientific experiment, no matter how spectacular the results, is not completed until the results are published. In fact, the cornerstone of the philosophy of science is based on the fundamental assumption that original knowledge must be published; only thus can new scientific knowledge be authenticated and then added to the existing database that we call scientific knowledge."

It overwhelms me sometimes and troubled me in the past. I often heard about how NUS chooses its lecturers based on their research and publications. And how we have not so good lecturers because their teaching is secondary to their research. I don't think this is completely true but I believe there is some truth in it, since Science is about getting things published. Then again, it makes having a lecturer who is both passionate about teaching and research, a rare gem.

It will take a while to get this into my mind. Never in my 12 years of education did I know there was something called primary literature. I always though textbooks was it. I didn't know people wrote textbooks based on all these scientific publications. If I were a teacher in a Secondary school or Junior College, I would tell them and explain to them.

Then again, I might be the frog in the well. I believe my other friends who were attached to some schools doing research know about this.