Careless publishing costs patents

Michael McArthur

I remember, with only a little fondness, being advised as an undergraduate molecular biologist in 1990 to keep up to date with the scientific literature by spending my Friday afternoons in the library with the Science Citation Index. It was an awkward tome, containing only the title of each article and what would now amount to a tweet’s-worth of the abstract.

Today, a web search returns more references than you can read in a lifetime, covering a breadth of views that it was not possible to be exposed to back then. A growing part of that literature comes from a recent development: solely online journals.