Post by Iulia Georgescu

The amount of scientific literature is growing at a staggering rate. In physics alone, more than 19,000 articles were published in 2016 and this is only what is indexed by Web of Science, excluding unpublished arXiv preprints, some conference papers, technical reports and PhD theses. There is little hope that anyone can keep up with what is going on outside their area of expertise and even that is a challenge. Review articles come in handy, but even reading just the physics review articles published in 2016 is hard — there’s more than 860 of them!

The scientific literature is expanding, but is it also becoming more diverse? Not really. A quick look back at the history of scientific publishing will remind us that innovation is not something publishers can really take pride in. The format and type of narrative of the scientific article has changed little since the early days of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, the oldest scientific journal still publishing today. In the more than 350 years of existence, scientific journals have transitioned from print to online. Articles can now link to external content, have some limited interactivity in the figures, and can sometimes include embedded videos, but essentially the working horse of scientific publishing remains the two-column dull-looking pdf, not too different in style and format from the papers published in print in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. The scientific article of the future – a hub for multimedia resources used to illustrate the narrative – remains a dream, mainly due to the technical challenges involved in integrating all the parts, but also to the inertia of both the academic and publishing worlds.

However, we start to see signs of change. In the past few years we have seen the rise of truly new article types like data descriptors, and software journals are starting to take off. These changes reflect the growing importance of scientific software and data analysis in science and the spreading awareness of the relevance of non-traditional research outputs. Such new formats and outlets are very welcome and as they become more accepted and used, they can hopefully trigger more innovation.

How about reviews? Review articles are a young format, at least when compared to traditional articles – dedicated reviews journals started to emerge in the 1920s. But in almost a century they have not changed much. With the notable exception of Living Reviews – review articles regularly updated by their authors, we have not seen much innovation, at least in physics. Standard reviews are long, authoritative and exhaustive pieces. Shorter reviews on fast-growing fields have only become popular in during the past decade or so.

Continue reading →

Post by Christine Horejs

Since starting my new endeavour as an Associate Editor on the Nature Reviews Materials team, I find myself often surrounded by physicists from all sorts of fields, during lunch, at the office Christmas party and at conferences. I have recently even participated in a discussion about axion particles while enjoying my burrito in the canteen. Well, to be fair, I hardly participated in this conversation, mainly owing to the fact that for the most part of it, I thought we were talking about axons in the brain. Anyhow, with a PhD in biophysics and a Postdoc in biomaterials, I still often feel like Captain Janeway in the Delta Quadrant, discovering new fields, principles, theories and yes, particles, every day – and feeling far away from home sometimes.

What makes biophysics so exciting in the ocean of interdisciplinary fields is the fact that the communities of biologist and physicists could not be further apart from each other in terms of methodology, theoretical background and publishing practices. Yet, this fusion of disciplines has led to important new insights into long-standing biological questions that could not have been easily tackled without the help and insight of physicists. Such collaborations certainly require an open mind. I still remember, during the first year of my PhD, when the physicist I was collaborating with suggested to model my complex, folded, 3D protein (which took me a whole year to recombinantly express in bacteria) as a simple sphere with some surface charges – shocking! But the truth is, using his simplified assumption we could beautifully simulate how this protein self-assembles, which was later experimentally confirmed.

The field of high-resolution microscopy is probably the most striking example of how physics helped to revolutionize the way we see many biological processes. Super-resolution microscopy, developed by physicists, allowed us for the first time to truly observe single proteins in a cell. Force spectroscopy enabled the measurement of biological forces in the piconewton range, unthinkable with traditional biochemical bulk methods. A picobalance, engineered by biophysicists, facilitated the measurement of the mass of a single living cell. How tissues evolve and how cells move has been described using models borrowed from the physics of active matter, which led to fascinating insights into cancer cell migration and tumour biology. Drug testing is greatly being improved by molecular modelling and computer simulations. And this list could go on and on, and I must confess, it is a bit biased towards my own previous work.

However, aforementioned examples illustrate the fruitful synergy between physics and biology, and the field is certainly ripe for exciting future collaborations and new discoveries. So, whoever feels sometimes like Captain Janeway when reading physics papers or when starting new interdisciplinary collaborations, just embrace the other field and boldly discover the new Quadrant – Engage!

Christine Horejs