Vol. 2 - I left my methods section in El Segundo
The importance of reading papers of different ages to understand the evolution of a field and appreciate progress.
I love A Tribe Called Quest.
But there isn't a lot of hip hop like that anymore. Whenever you hear these old school beats now, it is likely as part of a sample. Generations of artists used them as a foundation to build something new. A Tribe Called Quest sampled Lou Reed on Can I Kick It?, and then Gorillaz sampled that track on November Has Come, and onward it goes. When the technique changes, the norms of a genre evolve, and the legacy of classics is manifested in the way they are re-used.
This is true of the scientific literature as well, and this is relevant to the way we teach students what to read.
I teach a reading-based class on ecological networks. Over the course of a term, we go through approximately thirty papers, spanning over 50 years of research. But none of these papers are classics. We don't specifically spend time reading Briand & Cohen '84, or Martinez '92, or May '73. The assumption is that these papers will show up frequently enough (both in other papers, and in our discussions) that their importance will be obvious.
A category of papers that I enjoy reading with students instead is papers from 10 to 20 years ago. In particular, I think it is important to pay attention to two elements in these papers: what was a big question in the field at this time, and how was the community approaching this question. These papers are important because they serve as signposts between the foundational questions of the field, and the current research questions.
Reading these papers helps students develop a clearer understanding of the arc of our discipline.
But more importantly, these papers help with building a timeline of the changes in methodology and infrastructure. Last term, we read a paper from the mid '00s, where the authors were sharing their enthusiasm about having access to 12 Intel Pentium CPUs to run food web simulations. This seems very quaint today, but it gives us reason to remain humble about the tools we use: the research that took place in the mid '00s was no less pioneering than the research we conduct today, and it had to work around some limitations in the tools that were accessible.
The questions we ask, as a discipline, are always framed by the history of questions we have asked since the inception of the field. But how we phrase these questions is defined by the tools we can use. Focusing on the very first papers of a field is maybe overstating their importance, as we can see their ideas in action across the recent literature. Focusing on the most recent papers gives an ahistorical perspective of the field. But looking at the evolution of ideas over time encourages students to appreciate how far we have progressed, and how much farther we will go.
And now, stay tuned for Vol. 3 next week, where I will discuss a few recent papers in ecology.