BU Libraries | Science and Engineering Library | Flow of Scientific Information

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The following quote underlines the importance of communication in the evolution of scientific information:

Upon hearing that he was awarded the Nobel Prize with Brenner and Horvitz, Sir John Sulston is quoted as saying that; "The worm [C. elegans] worked so well because the community held an ethos of sharing - just as the public genome projects have - from the beginning. We gave all our results to others as soon as we had them. From sharing, discovery is accelerated in the community. Research is hastened when people share results freely." (The Guardian, October 8, 2002

How scientific information becomes common knowledge

Scientific information evolves through a continuous process of communication among scientists. It develops in cycles moving from ideas, through research that tests the ideas, to publications reporting the results, first in the primary literature and later in the secondary and, if significant enough, in the tertiary literature. New ideas, inspired by what has gone on before, are the start of new cycles. The following chart describes an idealized picture of this process.

Year 1	IDEA	Formation of a hypothesis.
Year 1	RESEARCH	Search of the literature to see what has been done before and testing of the hypothesis in the lab or field.
Years 1-3	INVISIBLE COLLEGE	Informal discussion of research with colleagues via email, discussion lists, at meetings, seminars, etc.
	GREY LITERATURE	More formal record of research published as preprint or technical report, a personal website, or given as a paper at conference for which proceedings not published. (This type of publication is part of the primary literature, since it is an original record of research, but is called "grey" by librarians because harder to locate than the readily available primary literature below.)
	PRIMARY LITERATURE	Detailed record of research formally published as an article in a journal or a paper in the published proceedings of a conference. Some of these are brief reports of research in progress (sometimes called "communications"or "letters"), with whole journals or a section of a journal devoted to this format. Unlike these brief reports and papers delivered at conferences, the longer research articles in scholarly journals are peer-reviewed prior to publication lending them the most authority. The primary literature is readily available through the secondary literature below.
Years 3-5	SECONDARY LITERATURE	Publications summarizing and pointing to the primary literature soon after it appears. Their main purpose is to facilitate timely access to scientific information. Most significant in this category are indexing & abstracting services (also called electronic indexes or article databases), in which you can search across journals to find articles of interest. Also in this category are review articles published in journals or appearing in annual volumes devoted exclusively to reviews. A review is a digest of recent research in a particular subject area and, if available for your topic, an invaluable resource for background information.
Years 5-10	TERTIARY LITERATURE	Publications that also summarize and point to the primary literature, but generally only after it has become widely accepted and believed, such as handbooks, encyclopedias, textbooks, and popular literature-- all good sources for background information.

Scope and content of selected literature

Journals, a subset of what we call periodicals or serials, are the most significant type of primary literature. The peer review process, by which articles are evaluated prior to publication, gives the journals unique status and legitimacy among the primary literature formats. Although newspapers and magazines are also periodicals, they are published for a broader and more popular audience and are not peer-reviewed. In addition, their content is often secondary literature, i.e. about the research of others rather than the original reports. The scholarly journals are the major focus of the library literacy section of BI108. Check the eJournals A-Z list for for journals that are available online to the Boston University community.

Multidisciplinary science journals - the three most significant:
Nature and Science contain both primary and secondary literature. Use the table of contents in these journals to identify primary and secondary literature. For information about the difference between primary and secondary literature, see the scientific information table above.

Biological sciences- most influential journals dealing with multiple levels of biological activity:

Molecular and Cellular Biology - first tier journals:

Molecular and Cellular Biology - second tier journals:

Genetics, Biotechnology, and Developmental Biology - first tier journals:

Genetics, Biotechnology, and Developmental Biology - second tier journals:

Microbiology and Immunology - first tier journals:

Microbiology and Immunology - second tier journals:

Reviews are a type of secondary literature because they summarize and point to the primary literature very soon after it has appeared. They are excellent background material, because they pull together all the latest research on a topic. Annual volumes devoted entirely to review articles, such as the titles below, are available in most disciplines. To search for review articles included in journals, add "review" to your keywords.

Encyclopedias are a type of tertiary literature because they contain summaries of scientific information that over time has become widely accepted and believed.

World Wide Web - The "free" web is a good source for information on news, gossip, advertisements, comparison shopping, etc. but, unfortunately for students and researchers, it is weak in traditional scholarship. This is why many of your instructors caution you against using the web in your research, fearing the indiscriminate use of information retrieved from surfing the web. See the Web searching section of the Science and Engineering Library's Reference and Instruction page for help with evaluating websites. Many scholarly websites, our article databases and electronic journals, for example, are available to you only because the library pays for subscriptions. These and other recommended sites, carefully selected from the "free" web by library staff, are included in the research guide below.

Biology Research Guide

getting started > scientific information