Use of the Scientific Literature (osmium & irw)

[osmium]

Originally Posted by kidneystones

irw writes....[...]

All right. You and osmium are arguing then, if I understand you, for a particular style of paper-writing that makes depends on researchers being thoroughly up-to-date on all published material in their area of expertise in all languages, I presume, before the piece is submitted for publication.

Kind of, yes. But that's one of the points of peer-review: if there is a major piece of background literature you're missing, a reviewer should tell you you have to include it and consider it. That's one of the checks/balances that you are up-to-date.

The language thing can be difficult, but generally only because the journal is completely unavailable to you, like because it's in Japanese, etc. In that case, if it has an important result, it will eventually be covered in a literature review article in English, and you will get its point from there. So that adds a couple years to the meme's time constant for spreading far and wide, but it still will.

People will compete for being the first person to find an important, obscure paper. Doubly so if it's in a far-out language.

Fun fact: If you can get ahold of the journal that a foreign-language paper is in, the language barrier is no issue. With some caveats, a well-written scientific paper should be clear from the figures. And with a language you can do google translate on selected sentences for, like German or French, you can pretty much read the whole thing given a few hours.

Cheers