LAUSR

I think of International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism as a young publication, since my sports nutrition career predates its birth. Therefore, my shock at seeing the 27th volume/year imprint on the masthead caused me to reflect on the enormous changes in the landscape of scientific communications over the period since the inaugural edition. People of a certain age are notoriously nostalgic for the good ole days, but it’s laughable to think back on the logistics of producing scientific journals in the early ‘90s. Manuscripts were submitted and reviewed via snail mail, and a year between a first draft and the appearance of the paper in a hard copy journal was deemed an efficient process. It took considerable effort to stay abreast of the literature, via personal subscriptions to journals or a routine of regular visits to an institutional library. Even then, it required patience to scour the shelves and tables of contents to find information of interest, and an assisted journal search involved using CD-ROMs from MEDLINE with clumsy search tools. Before LinkedIn and Research Gate, colleague were contacted about their work via a handwritten or personalized reprint request card, or accosted at a conference. Conferences were the best way to connect with the latest data, and your colleagues could be found there, paying full attention to the meeting, because there was no opportunity to sit at the back of a lecture, furtively preparing a PowerPoint presentation for the following day’s session. Indeed, slides were produced in advance of the meeting, and if a typo or some new data on your topic was found before presentation, it was considered bad luck. Being a well-informed and well-respected sports scientist required a lot of hard work! Yet, even as I marveled at the challenges and barriers present at the start of my career, I was struck by an apparent contradiction. Despite the immediacy, convenience and breadth of our current access to scientific information, and the ease with which we can communicate our own exploits, I am not alone in feeling that we are living in the most challenging of times to be a scientist. This is not isolated to sports science/nutrition; I’m sure that climate scientists and vaccine researchers are also frustrated that their expertise is poorly valued and their field has been hijacked. However, since nutrition is a universal practice as well as a science, many more people feel entitled to promote their own dietary experiences as data or a template that others should follow. That we live in strange times was made clear by the decision of the Oxford Dictionary to recognize “posttruth” as its 2016 Word of the Year; an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’ (Oxford University Press, 2017). Of course, this is just an update of the concept of “truthiness”, coined in 2005 by American political comedian Stephen Colbert (Wikipedia, 2017) to explain the concept: “if you feel it in your gut, you know it must be right”. This sentiment can further transposed to our field where sports science and “scienciness” might be differentiated in the following way: