Scientific journals tend to have very strict formatting. There is an expected structure. There are templates. If an author tries to deviate, it’ll probably get changed back to tradition somewhere in the editorial process. Not to mention it’ll annoy the reviewers and you really don’t want to do with that. But every now and then you do see some weird formatting in scientific papers. Today we’re looking at a few things that you can most likely only get away with once.
An Extremely Short Paper
Scientific papers tend to get a little wordy. Usually even the abstracts run long (with a few notable hilarious examples). Reviewers loved saying mine were too long but never could point to anything they thought should actually be left out so I tended to get away with it in the end.
Math publishing is a bit of a different world from other scientific disciplines. For one thing, experimental math isn’t really that much a thing. Every branch of science has theoretical subdisciplines but math is the theory. Math professors tend to publish less frequently than other disciplines since the work takes such a different form.
Euler’s Conjecture of the sum of like powers states that at n nth powers are required to sum to a number that is an nth power. The authors could potentially have elaborated a bit on that in the introduction. Apparently they felt it was well enough known that they didn’t need to though. Technically all they needed to publish a counterexample was the actual example. And that’s basically what Lander and Parkin opted to do. They even mentioned they found their counterexample by having a CDC 6600 search through possible combinations, bringing the entire paper to two sentences.
No, there wasn’t an abstract.
A Blank Paper
Technically, the above is only the shortest paper I could find that used actual words. But there is actually an example out there where the title is longer than the paper. Psychologist Dennis Webber found himself struggling with a serious case of writer’s block and attempted to treat it by writing about it. This… did not work. At all.
Negative results tend to be much harder to get published, but the paper found itself in the hands of a reviewer who valued publishing them. And thus “The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of Writer’s Block” was published in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Analysis. It consists of nothing but blank space.
In a rare move they even included the reviewer’s comments rather than a simple “Reviewer 3 made me do it.” Presumably because the editor was amused by the reviewer’s efforts to examine the paper for invisible ink in order to find any flaws in the writing. As there were none, the paper earned an exceedingly rare “published without revisions”.
The paper does make the author’s point effectively, so perhaps we can all learn something from it.
A Rhyming TOC Blurb
The table of contents blurb tends to be a little less formal than the actual abstract, but generally it’s still pretty straightforward. We’ve looked that the puns in Angewande Chemie subtitles before, so it’s probably not entirely surprising that there are other shenanigans in that journal.
In a 2009 issue honouring Roald Hoffman’s eightieth birthday, Zurek, Edwards and Hoffman decided the best way to present their table of contents blurb was to have it rhyme. Which did at least cause me to remember their paper years later. You can get away with anything when you’re a Nobel Laureate celebrating a milestone birthday.
If, to ammonia one adds a metal,
The solution grows real unsettled.
A fine blue color is seen throughout
First by Humphry Davy, no doubt.
From lithium, electrons are released
The density of the solution decreased!
Soaked electrons are born, spins pair
Until a real band forms, debonaire!
Lowering the T of this ebullition
Impels a liquid–liquid partition,
Superconductivity? Why not?
Molecular orbitals hit the spot.
From blue to gold, the story unfolds.
The rhyme and scansion are a bit forced, but it gets the job done. Notably, Hoffman is actually a published poet so it’s possible that some of the things that cause me to raise an eyebrow are stylistic choices. On a side note, he has authorship on nearly every paper in this special issue which is quite the present.
Also I can’t really judge since I definitely wrote an undergraduate lab report in the style of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.
A Paper in Verse
It’s also possible that they opted to stick to the TOC for the rhyme as there already existed an entire paper written in verse. Bunnett and Kearley do not go so far as to make the entire paper rhyme but there is distinctive meter to qualify the paper as poetic.
Once again, the footnotes are what really makes this particular paper so very entertaining. And not just because of my previously proclaimed love of a good footnote. The editor actually explicitly says that they’re allowing this because the science is sound but people should not go getting ideas. This is a classic case of something you can do exactly once.
Which is a pity, because having to write the paper in verse might make scientists think about their work in a different way. We do need more overlap with science and literature, after all.