Publications, replication and statistics in physiology plus two neglected curves

Abstract

I was asked to write a short editorial to reflect on my links to The Journal of Physiology and to consider some of the changes in physiology reflected in The Journal. The pandemic has delayed my efforts just as it has delayed many planned gatherings of scientists. As physiologists, we all view physiology in different ways, depending on what levels of function we try to unravel – from the level of molecules and their interactions to the level of populations of cells and neurones, and finally to the level of whole organisms. Across our scientific careers, most of us stick with one of those levels and we likely over-estimate the importance of our own contributions. My first publication in The Journal was in 1976 – my Bachelor of Medical Science thesis on proprioception (Gandevia & McCloskey, 1976). This has remained a theme of my work ever since and my colleagues and I continue to explore new high-level proprioceptive illusions affecting the hand (Heroux et al. 2018). However, serendipity delivered another theme because I was not able to begin my proprioceptive experiments on time in 1975 because the equipment had not been finished. So, my supervisor Ian McCloskey and I turned to study the effect of activation of proprioceptive afferents with chest vibration on breathing patterns in anaesthetised rabbits. The work was duly published in 1976 and after graduating in Medicine, I continued my clinical neurophysiological interest in the neural control of respiration, exclusively in humans thereafter. This dual start meant that I was comfortable to approach broader questions about the control of voluntary movement. This led, for example, to work on the control of the human diaphragm (e.g. Gandevia & Rothwell, 1987) and upper airway muscles (Saboisky et al. 2007) and broader work on central fatigue (e.g. Gandevia et al. 1996; Taylor et al. 1996; Gandevia, 2001). Nonetheless, I was surprised in 2011 when I realised, I had published over a hundred papers in The Journal, and became an honorary member of The Journal of Physiology’s Century Citation Club (https://physoc.onlinelibrary. wiley.com/hub/journal/14697793/features/ century-citation-club). Subsequently, I was asked by the editor of the Physiological Society magazine how I had reached this milestone. Apart from the inevitable passage of time, it indicated my simultaneous pursuit of several lines of physiological investigation. Why did I continue to publish inThe Journal?My reply was that I believed that submitted papers nearly always received a fair appraisal based on good-quality reviews. Formal inspection of issues of The Journal published in 1976 and then at five-year intervals thereafter reveals many changes1. Most notable is the growth in the number of authors per paper from a mean of 2.2 ± 0.9 (SD; n = 86) in 1976 to 5.1 ± 2.9 (n = 103) in 2016. Less obvious is the increase in the size of papers from around 9000 words to 14,0002. One explanation is the move to bigger teams involved in projects along with the use of more techniques. Second, the proportion of papers with an overt clinical link (such as studies in humans with disease or animal models) has increased – this translational focus is a trend promoted actively by the previous and current Editors-in-Chief ofThe Journal. Third, the development of molecular and imaging techniques has providedmany new and sometimes unexpected physiological landscapes. A personal example. In my work with colleagues on the upper airway we manipulated a magnetic resonance imaging method to view the motion of the largest airway dilator muscle in humans, the genioglossus. Surprisingly, we found