In praise of longer papers
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.010100
In today’s New York Times, the newspaper’s media columnist David Carr described a new online media outlet called the Atavist . Defying the trend to publish ever shorter, catchier items, the Atavist publishes (to quote from its website)
original nonfiction and narrative journalism for digital devices like the iPad, iPhone, Kindle, and Nook. Our stories are longer than typical magazine articles but shorter than books, written by experienced reporters and authors and designed digitally from the start. Each story has extensive free text and audio excerpts here at the site, with links to where you can buy and read them in full.
Carr’s article got me thinking about physics papers. If you have a hot result and want to publish it in Physical Review Letters, Nature, or Science, then make sure your write-up is short—no more than four pages for PRL, and no more than five pages for the longest format in Nature and Science.
Some papers really don’t need to be especially long. Francis Crick and James Watson’s famous paper of May 1953, “Genetical Implications of the Structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid,” occupied just over two pages of Nature. In December 1962 Nick Holonyak and S. F. Bevacqua spent just under two pages of Applied Physics Letters in describing the world’s first LED.
But other papers, like the narrative journalism that the Atavist publishes, need plenty of space for their authors to properly introduce and describe their findings. Although Albert Einstein’s most cited paper, “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?” (which he wrote in 1935 with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen) is about three pages long, arguably his most important paper, “The Foundation of General Relativity” of 1916, filled 53 pages of Annalen der Physik.
The cost of producing an additional “page” of an online journal is far lower than it is for a print journal. Given that physicists nowadays browse, search for, and even read papers online, I wonder if the time has come to revisit the short-is-best presumption.
Like other modern consumers of information, physicists must be judicious in choosing what to read. Short papers might seem to bring some relief, but do they? If, to understand a short paper, you have to consult its references or—a pet peeve of mine—have to read online appendices, have you saved any time?
And even if a short paper, its appendices, and its key antecedents, don’t take longer to read than a longer, self-contained paper, a longer paper could be clearer and easier to digest thanks to its single, coherent narrative.
Anthony Leggett shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics for explaining the superfluid phases of helium-3. He published his original research in PRL and other physics journals, but the paper that is cited the most—and the only paper of his mentioned by the Nobel committee in its background material—is his 1975 paper in Reviews of Modern Physics. It’s 83 pages long.
