Books in Brief: The Best of “The Journal of Irreproducible Results”

The Best of “The Journal of Irreproducible Results,” edited by George H. Scherr (Workman, 195 pp., $8.95, paper)

For the benefit of any non-scientists in the house, the validity of an experimental outcome is judged by one key test: Can the results be reproduced by somebody else? If so, you’re on your way to publication in a scholarly journal; if not, there’s always The Journal of Irreproducible Results, a magazine founded in 1955 in order to provide a home for the less reputable brainchildren of scientists with a sense of humor. The Best of “The Journal of Irreproducible Results” contains 94 wildly funny monographs ranging from a thoughtful essay on the inheritance pattern of death (“a classic Mendelian autosomal recessive pattern”) to an exciting new personality test (“I become homicidal when people try to reason with me”). Familiarity with the idiosyncrasies of a scholarly journal is helpful when reading this book, but it isn’t obligatory; scientific double-talk has become a universal non-language over the last couple of decades. Insiders, however, will howl over Donald D. Jackson’s “A Brief History of Scholarly Publishing,” which ends with this eloquent item: “Copy editors’ anthem ‘Revise or Delete’ is first sung at national convention. Quarrel over hyphen in second stanza delays official acceptance.” Hooray!