Got content, get attention

Content is king. I still believe that. But with the abundance of kings, how can you distinguish the ones wearing real gold, who truly reign over territories with treasures, from the pretenders to the throne? Saturated with content, readers are faced with information overload. As publishers, we and others are encouraging this deluge and shoulder some of the blame for the content explosion, although I believe we deserve some praise for this as well. Having figured out how to get scholarly information distributed and discovered online, we now need to focus on a far more complex challenge because the amount of material scientists must read – and this is certainly not limited to journal articles – continues to increase while the available time to digest it does not. The practical challenge of getting readers’ attention is daunting when they are exposed to so much of the ‘stuff’ that results from their searching, browsing, pursuing a seemingly endless number of links, or following up on the recommendations that publishers and others put in front of them. How, then, do we capture, direct, and keep the attention of scientific audiences and also enable them to discern what is important, both in the scholarship itself and for themselves? And if readers see something of interest, will they read enough of it to comprehend its essence and be able to recall what they deemed important? Even if readers are good at multitasking or back-processing, we may have only a tiny part of their attention. The diversity of information entices the reader down various information pathways that are just a click away. This can be a beautiful benefit that was not as richly available before the Web existed, and it allows the reader to be exposed speedily to copious related information that could influence directions of thought and spark ideas. But there’s a downside. Effort is required for readers to jump off the path of literature exploration and return to concentrating on what they had set out to do. Reading in order to understand and absorb requires attention as readers constantly translate characters and symbols into a string of something comprehensible. Unless we get to the point, as inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has envisioned, that we can supplement our brains with nano-engineered tools to enhance our capabilities with a mix of our biological selves and implanted artificial-intelligence aids, we will not be able to function like high-speed data-processing machines. For now, we must rely on our own still substantial abilities to think, absorb, remember, and use what we take in to be creative. Multiple reasons for the explosion of scientific information have been identified. Well-known ones include continuing growth in the volume of digitized literature – both past and currently created materials – and the increase in global research investment and number of researchers, which accelerates article output and the creation of even more journals. I suspect that another reason there are more scholarly articles is because researchers are publishing in smaller publishable units by separately reporting results in multiple publications rather than waiting for completion of large, complex, often multicenter studies for presentation in one article. We all can agree that salami publishing – slicing findings from some of the same studies using the same data into contributions that are transparently thin – is undesirable for many reasons. But determining when the slice is too thin, or that it has no flavor, or has enough filler even to be called ‘salami,’ is subjective at best. This is not always undesirable. Consider the scale and complexity of high-energy physics research – it takes a great deal of time to build and test a device, to design experiments and confirm their results, and to collect and analyze large amounts of data that are distributed to scientists all over the world. What would it mean for stimulating innovation or new discoveries, or for graduate education and career advancement, if results presenting reasonable contributions did not emerge in publications incrementally as they became available, if we had to wait years until the entire experiment or suite of experiments was completed? Another example is the multistep synthesis of complex, naturally occurring chemical materials, such as vitamin B12. The complete synthesis was undertaken competitively in two labs and published after many years of work. However, the chemisEditorial 245