Being an author of a scientific paper is still the most secure building bock of a scientific career and a way to recognition. As a result people fight to be on the author list and are disappointed – if not angry – when they feel that they are left out for no good reason.

The criteria for earning a coauthorship  differ from discipline to discipline and from country to country. It is not uncommon for a director of a big institute to have a publication list of over a thousand entries. It is clear that he cannot even have read all those papers.

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In the Shakespeare play As You Like It main character Rosalind reads the epilogue, from which we cite:

If it be true that good wine needs no bush, ’tis true that a good play needs no epilogue;

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The reason for writing this post is a bewildering experience on my side while preparing a talk a few months ago. I was invited to give presentation on May 17 of this year for a 200-people audience at a material science conference.  The organizers had asked me to deliver a critical – and if possible, humorous –  evaluation of the development in science that the presentation of results gets an ever increasing weight, much at the expense of the content. While preparing the slides for my speech I was looking for an example of a paper of outstanding presentation quality. So I checked which paper was selected that week (Published May 10, 2010) to be an outstanding example of  Physical Review Letters (PRL), the most important physics journal. I was shocked to discover that this scientifically indeed brilliant paper, selected by the prestigious board of editors, was of abominable presentation quality (I will give details later).

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