The Scientific Literature: A Guided Tour

by Harmon, Joseph E.

• ISBN13: 9780226316550
• ISBN10: 0226316556
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-03-15
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

The scientific article has been a hallmark of the career of every important western scientist since the seventeenth century. Yet its role in the history of science has not been fully explored. Joseph E. Harmon and Alan G. Gross remedy this oversight withThe Scientific Literature, a collection of writingsexcerpts from scientific articles, letters, memoirs, proceedings, transactions, and magazinesthat illustrates the origin of the scientific article in 1665 and its evolution over the next three and a half centuries. Featuring articlesas well as sixty tables and illustrations, tools vital to scientific communicationthat represent the broad sweep of modern science,The Scientific Literatureis a historical tour through both the rhetorical strategies that scientists employ to share their discoveries and the methods that scientists use to argue claims of new knowledge. Commentaries that explain each excerpt's scientific and historical context and analyze its communication strategy accompany each entry. A unique anthology,The Scientific Literaturewill allow both the scholar and the general reader to experience first hand the development of modern science.

Author Biography

Joseph E. Harmon is senior technical communicator at Argonne National Laboratory. Alan G. Gross is professor in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of Minnesota. Together, they coauthored Communicating Science: The Scientific Article from the 17th Century to the Present.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

First English Periodical

Early Books and Letters

New experiments physico mechanical (1660)

Micrographia (1665)

Anatomy of fleas (1693) Philosophical Transactions

Watches at sea (1665)

Apertures of object glasses (1665)

Transfusion (1667)

Experiments about respiration (1670)

Theory of light and colors (1672)

Answer to letter from Pardies (1672)

Sieur Bernier's flying machine (1681)

English vegetables (1697)

Argument for divine providence (1710)

Effects of electricity in paralytic cases (1758)

Experiments on air (1784)

New comet (1787) On Early English Scientific Writing

Considerations Touching Experimental Essays (1661)

History of the Royal Society (1667)

Works of the Royal Society (1751)

First French Periodicals

Concerning the Royal Academy in Paris

History of the Royal Academy (1733) Journal of the Learned

Letter written from Oxford (1665)

Review of Anatomical Description (1669)

Speed of light (1676)

Review of Principia (1688) Memoirs of the Royal Academy of Sciences

History of plants (1676)

Two fetuses enclosed in the same membrane (1693)

Corispermum Hyssopifolium (1712)

Different relationships observed in chemistry (1718)

The figure of the earth (1738)

Conservation and reestablishment of forests (1739)

Nature of prismatic basalt (1774)

Combustion (1777)

Modern horizontal beds deposited by the sea (1789)

Internationalization and Specialization German Literature

Calculation of various dimensions of figures (1684)

Metamorphosis of insects (1705)

Measurement of humidity (1769)

Review of Three Letters on Mineralogy (1789) American Literature

American species of dipus (1799)

Bones of quadruped of the clawed kind (1799)

Description of bones deposited by President (1799)

North American insects of the genus Cicindela (1818)

Production o

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