Historical Research in the Atmospheric Sciences

JULY 2004 AMERICAN METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY | T his paper originated from a talk given at the sixth annual meeting of the Atmospheric Science Librarians International, at the 2003 American Meteorological Society (AMS) annual meeting, on 13 February 2003. Because one of the themes of the meeting was the history of the atmospheric sciences, I was asked to give a talk about doing research on the history of science through reviews of the scientific literature. The talk ended up showing the contribution that reference librarians can make to scientists, especially those scientists doing literature reviews. I am more a scientist than a historian of science, but as this paper shows, my research has taken me into some interesting aspects of historical research in order to understand and interpret my scientific interests. Scientific literature reviews are a way to distill the essence of a specific research topic into a piece of literature. In the distant past, summaries of the literature consisted of bibliographies, or lists of relevant papers on a particular topic with a short summary of their findings (e.g., Goodman 2003). The first, if not most significant, collection of scientific review articles in meteorology was the Compendium of Meteorology (Malone 1951). The stated purpose of the Compendium was “to take stock of the present position of meteorology, to summarize and appraise the knowledge that untiring research has been able to wrest from nature during past years, and to indicate the avenues of further study and research that need to be explored in order to extend the frontiers of our knowledge” (Malone 1951, p. v). Reviews of Geophysics, a journal that would occasionally feature articles on atmospheric science, was founded in the 1960s. The recent trend in the number of review articles is upward, fueled by the number of tribute symposia at the AMS annual meetings (e.g., the 2000 Fujita Symposium, documented in the January 2001 BAMS). Literature reviews are the scientific equivalent of a box set of music. More than just a greatest hits package, or a recitation of relevant articles that pay lip service to their authors, literature reviews serve a numHISTORICAL RESEARCH IN THE ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCES The Value of Literature Reviews, Libraries, and Librarians