Volume 2 - December, 1996 - December, 1997

Many journal articles in the fields of biological and biotechnological research are written to present the work of a researcher to his colleagues. Journals are the information superhighway of science. Ideas are exchanged and tested according to a researcher’s article. When researchers begins a new project, they will first search the scientific journals for information on a given topic using a search engine. They will design an experiment employing methods similar to those found in these articles to do original work. If they are skeptical of the results reported in the journals, they might try the experiment themselves to see if they gets similar results.

The journal article "Plant-Insect Interactions: The Hackberry Nipple Gall," describes how researchers are pushing forward the frontiers of science by unraveling the mysteries of galls, tumor-like growths caused by jumping plant lice. The term jumping plant lice is used to refer to about 2,000 different species of insects of the Psyllidae family. More specifically, those lice in the Pachypsylla genus cause galls on the leaves of plants where they lay their eggs. The gall that forms consists of an outer protective layer of thick walled cells and a nutritive cell lining which serves as a source of sugars, proteins, and other nutrients.

The authors of the article studied this phenomenon in the hackberry tree using Pachypsylla cetidis-mamma. The protein composition of both the galls and the young nymphs were isolated and analyzed using various methods. The results of the research are inconclusive, but it lays the groundwork for numerous future experiments.

The title of the article, "Plant-Insect Interactions: The Hackberry Nipple Gal," is short and to the point. This is an indication that the article reports no experimental data. If an experiment were conducted, the title would be more descriptive. For example, the title may read, "The response of Hackberry gall cells to isopentenyadenosine (iPA)."

The article is organized in a format that is standard for scholarly research journals. In the WWW journal of Biology, all articles must include a title page, abstract, introduction, materials and methods section, results, discussion, conclusions, acknowledgements and a reference section. The separation of these parts in the paper makes it much easier to read. In many search engines, only the abstract, a short summary, is provided. From reading this, researchers can decide if they want to read the entire article. If they are merely interested in the experimental design, they can skip to the materials and methods section. Everything is written in the third person passive voice using dispassionate language and a serious tone. The writer may want to persuade, but will rely solely on facts to do so.

The target audience of the article is the researcher in the biology and biotechnology field. The article is filled with technical jargon. It is assumed that the reader is familiar with language and terms in the document, and no definitions are given. Terms like "cytokinins," a protein excreted in an immune response, and techniques such as "immunoaffinity chromatography" can be found in an undergraduate cell biology book.

The purpose of the article is for the authors to present their work to their colleagues. Because of limited publication space, it is assumed that the reader is familiar with some basic background knowledge on the subject and methods. References are made to earlier work done by the authors and others in the field. Using these articles, the authors can add background knowledge without having to support it with data. Because there was a good deal of background in the paper, one can assume that not much research has been done on this subject recently. This is further supported by the fact that all the references are at least nine years old.

The authors include graphics of electrophoresis gels showing separation of proteins. They are interpreted in the article. It is assumed that the reader is able to understand these gels. In a hardcopy scientific journal, these graphics are all that would be published. This article also contains pictures of the Hackberry tree, the jumping tree lice, and pictures of the gals linked as hypertext in the document.

The web page design was excellent. In addition to the hypertext links to pictures, there were links to figures and cited references in the document. There were not any links to other pages. The text was larger and bolder than what would be found in a normal article, and contrasted against an off-white background. This made the article easier to read.

The credentials of the three authors cannot be determined by reading the article. The article does not make any prior reference to any earlier work done by the authors. Many are staple references, referring to common techniques used in biological research. Examples of these are Bradford MM (1976), and MacDonald EMMS, Morris RO. (1985).

Scientific journal articles can inundate the reader with more information than they can handle. But one need not be discouraged. Scientific articles mean many things to different people. Often, one can find everything they are looking for without understanding all that is stated in the article.