Looking over a bookshelf in our lab yesterday, I came to a realization: I don't read very many scientific books.
I dip into an occasional college/grad-level textbook if I have a two-minute question. But I don't read the books authored by senior scientists on (as drdrA says) "Poogly-plugs," although there are certainly a host of good ones. I'm worried about shelf life (literally!) of the science therein. Is it really better to read a book than to read five or six reviews in Trends or Current Opinion or whatever? By the time a book has been edited and published and distributed and purchased and read, isn't it scientific light-years out of date?
At the same time, I wonder if I'm missing something. If people are taking the time to synthesize the past, present, and future of their lifelong field into a (dense) volume, shouldn't I take a few days and read it, if I have more than a passing interest in the topic?
Also, these books are too heavy to take along on plane flights, so I can't bring them on vacation and ignore them the way I do with papers.
It's hard to carve out time to make a book a priority. But maybe I should?
15 years ago
7 comments:
I find that the quality of academic books varies wildly. Some books are intended for an educated lay audience, and thus don't really include any news for someone up on the field. Others look like someone just put together their notes from 360 different lectures: no synthesis, insanely boring.
But every once in awhile someone writes something good, really good. You can do things in a book that can't be done in a shorter format.
The gems are worth it. The trick is finding them...
Eh. I prefer biographies of scientists who had interesting lives. Usually there is some good science in there too, but many more important career and life lessons.
I call them mono-graphs and if you can find one that is well written, its an excellent way to introduce yourself to the foundation of an area. I am new to the field of immunology and have found Janeways Immunobiology to be very useful in providing the background necessary to understand alot the pieces that come out of Current Opinions or Trends. Simply because scientific review articles take it for granted that the readers are well versed in the original data / science that todays work is built on. Another example is Donald Bers Excitation-Contraction Coupling of the mammalian heart. It takes the reader step by step through decades of information, and would allow one to enter the field of EC coupling with a very strong understanding of where the research is coming from, and where it is going.
I vote for the reviews as opposed to the text books. I often find myself being skeptical reading a text book, thinking, is it still really thought to work like this?! Is that still an open question in the field? I read enough text books as an undergrad, and I suppose I'll have to read more when/if I ever become a faculty member, but in the mean time, I've had enough
I think it depends on the textbook. For example, even though my general chemistry textbook is 10 years old, I know that I can still trust it for information on acids and bases. I am more leery, however, of biology texts. We are learning so much more about biology every day that textbook info becomes outdated much more quickly.
In this case I'll assume that you're mainly discussing science books where the bulk of the contribution is by a single author. This is different than books where each chapter is either a minireview or covers a methodological issue. In the first case it seems journal article reviews makes more sense, and in the second case having a nice bound reference can be useful to go back and, well, refer to I guess.
For a single author book, what I think makes for a really good one is when the author does an excellent job of bringing in and relating topics that come from different subfields or different 'traditions' completely. The best example I have here is Bertil Hille's book, Ionic Channels of Excitable Membranes, specifically the second edition (red cover). I especially like the second half of the book, where he discusses a lot of physical chemistry, e.g. ions in solution, and does so in a way that electrophysiologists can immediately relate to. That makes for a great book, which I still pull down and read over from time to time. In fact, the addition of all the added info in the third addition (green cover), which devotes more space to the molecular biology of ion channels, is much less useful in my opinion.
Perhaps its a bit like the same problem YoungFemaleScientist is having with published, print copies of journals. Are they really that useful? More and more I'm leaning towards getting a Kindle from Amazon, or something similar, and going all digital. The only reason I like texts and printed journals is that I can read them _away_ from my bench. But then again, there's got to be a better way, right? I mean... books are soooo 20th century (sarcasm). Still again - occasionally you find a "timeless gem" of book, and it keeps its value for years... i suppose a mixture of the two is no doubt the solution.
Nice blog BTW! I've just gotten back into it myself, seems like a good distraction. I've added yours to my blogroll, I hope it's alright?
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