On Living For Scholarship
Your Scholarly Digest 13th November, 2025
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Hi Scholar,
There was something in the air in November 2004. Two of what are now among the world's most popular literature search tools were launched: Scopus on the 10th of November and Google Scholar on the 20th. The launch of these products was an inflection point in how researchers accessed information: there is a good chance that most of you reading this have only ever known a scholarship enabled by the world’s “information at your fingertips”.
A week before Scopus was released, a press release from Library Technology Guides featured a quote from Elsevier’s Managing Director for ScienceDirect and Bibliographic Databases:
“It's not about searching, it's all about finding… [Scopus] lets scientists focus on finding everything relevant: the expected as well as the unexpected. This brings serendipity and discovery into the game”
To scholars in 2025, this sentence may a little out of place, given how little time we have today for embracing the unexpected and serendipitous discovery. For us, “relevance” is an attribute reserved for a narrow slice of literature that explicitly relates to one’s specialized research interest. Of course, we access our literature using these same tools that were once about promoting serendipity and accidental discovery. Funny how quickly things can change in 24 years, isn’t it?
In today’s Digest, we have:
Brain Food: Science as a Vocation
News: Scholarship Found In Translation
Resource: Curvilinear Rationality in Scientific Writing
Keeping it Real: The Lens For All That We Can See, But Magnifies The Mystery
BRAIN FOOD
Science as a Vocation
Weber’s classic lecture-turned-essay, “Science as a Vocation”, puts forth an argument that would not be too unfamiliar to regular readers of The Scholarly Letter:
Science, research, and scholarship are not simply ‘jobs’ or ‘professions’ but rather a calling and a devotion.
He draws a distinction between ‘living from science’ and ‘living for science’. By examining the material and institutional conditions under which academic careers in Germany and America took place at the time of writing his essay, he shows how it is nearly impossible to live from science.
Scholar, Continue Reading?
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