Science papers are usually long and tedious to read, but every now and then, we get brilliantly short scientific papers that are short and straight to the point. Because this is a post about short papers, let's skip the usual intro and get to it, shall we?
Take, for example, the paper above titled The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of A Case of "Writer's Block" by clinical psychologist Dennis Upper of the Veterans Administration Hospital in Brockton, Massachusetts. It was published in 1974 in Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis.
The paper was ... blank, but contained the following comment by the reviewer:
I have studied this manuscript very carefully with lemon juice and X-rays and have not detected a single flaw in either design or writing style. I suggest it be published without revision. Clearly it is the most concise manuscript I have ever seen-yet it contains sufficient detail to allow other investigators to replicate Dr. Upper's failure. In comparison with the other manuscripts I get from you containing all that complicated detail, this one was a pleasure to examine. Surely we can find a place for this paper in the Journal-perhaps on the edge of a blank page."
Surprisingly, that's not the only scientific paper that's blank. In 2014, a paper was submitted to Nature Chemistry with the abstract:
Manufacturers of consumer products, in particular edibles and cosmetics, have broadly employed the term 'Chemical free' in marketing campaigns and on product labels. Such characterization is often incorrectly used to imply - and interpreted to mean - that the product in question is healthy, derived from natural sources, or otherwise free from synthetic components. We have examined and subjected to rudimentary analysis an exhaustive number of such products, including but not limited to lotions and cosmetics, herbal supplements, household cleaners, food items, and beverages. Herein are described all those consumer products, to our knowledge, that are appropriately labelled as 'Chemical free'.
And the rest of the paper was blank!
While the paper didn't make the cut into Nature Chemistry (who opted to publish it to their blog instead), the paper did get properly published in the German journal Chemie in unserer Zeit (50(2), 144-145).
Eagle-eyed readers: This is C.J. Chemjobber listed as the author above.
Those might be joke-y papers, but there are actually scientific papers with very, VERY short abstracts.
For example, this paper above by John C. Doyle, titled "Guaranteed Margins for LQG Regulators" published in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control in August 1978.
The abstract was nice and short - just three words saying "There are none."
This next paper by Berry et al, titled "Can apparent superluminal neutrino speeds be explained as a quantum weak measurement?" in Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical (2011) has an abstract that came in lower at two words: "Probably not."
But even three- and two-word abstracts were too long when you compare it to this one. In 1974, a paper published in Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, titled "Is the Sequence of Earthquakes in Southern California, with Aftershocks Removed, Poissonian?" and authored by J.K. Gardner and L. Knopoff, has a single word abstract: "Yes"
#sciencepaper #scientificpaper #science #abstract #writersblock
Further reading: The Shortest Paper Ever Published by Stefan Washietl in Paperpile (Jun 2016), which also listed two very short mathematical papers, one of which contained just one formula and two figures.