I. AVOID FRUITLESS EXPERIMENTS 



33 



years as far as the main body of scientific workers was concerned, 

 although absti'actiiifi; journals have done much to avoid such occur- 

 rences. An illustration of this language difficulty has occurred in 

 connection with the important discovery of the chromatographic 

 method b,y the talented Russian botanist Tswett. Although Tswett 

 realized the importance of his discovery and even published a com- 

 prehensive book on the subject in 1910, this new experimental tech- 

 nique remained practically unnoticed until two decades later — the 



Fig. 3. 



'Facts are still, and probably always will be, determined by vote' 

 Midge ly (^1). (Courtesy E. T. Churchman.) 



book had been published only in Russian. The first English language 

 book on chromatography, a translation of a revised German treatise, 

 did not appear until 1941 {2^). 



The unfortunate selection of a title can be effective in preventing 

 the wide reading of a scientific article. This seems to have been true 

 of the early articles on the conservation of energy by Joule and 

 Mayer {26). An unsatisfactory title can result in improper indexing 

 and perhaps may lead to its exclusion from the appropriate abstracting 

 journal. Although titles usually must be brief, and cannot possibly 

 convey the entire content of most articles, some thought should be 

 given to their creation in order that they may serve their pui-pose in a 

 reasonably effective manner. 



