Need for Speed

Scholars have always had the same problem, it seems: To try to keep up with all important work being done by their peers. Throughout the history of scholarly journals, many inventions have been made to communicate results faster, both by faster distribution, and by inventions that allowed readers to get a quick overview without necessarily reading everything.

The history of scholarly publishing lends itself to be described as a history of remediation, using the theory put forward by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin. In their view, each new medium is first seen as a competitor to earlier media, adopting well-known forms, but improving them in several ways.

The first journals adopted the letter form, multiplied by the printing press. In that way, scientific results could be spread much more efficient than by hand-written personal correspondence (Brown, Kronick). Most innovations seem to have tried to remedy the same problem: time. Researchers always have to try to keep up to date with an ever longer research front.

Abstract journals helped researchers identify the articles most interesting to them, and with the IMRAD format, they could even move directly to the parts of the articles they wanted, not needing to read each article in full.