Building a metaphor: Another brick in the wall?

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Douglas G Altman, director

¹Centre for Statistics in Medicine, University of Oxford, Wolfson College Annexe, Oxford OX2 6UD, UK

Correspondence to: D G Altman doug.altman{at}csm.ox.ac.uk

Accepted 15 November 2012

The metaphor of studies being bricks from which a wall is being built leads to new ideas about accumulating knowledge, explains Doug Altman

A common metaphor for the accumulation of scientific knowledge is of individual studies being the bricks from which a wall is being built. Each study contributes to the growing structure as “another brick in the wall,” a phrase that appears in hundreds of journal article titles on PubMed. Inspired by the clear similarity of the ideas in Forscher’s wonderful allegory1 and a witty comment of Poincaré,2 I acquired many related citations by multiple searches with Google and Google Scholar over five years (see box).

Brick and building metaphors

“Of metaphors applied to science, the most evocative is the building of an edifice of knowledge with every paper serving as a brick”3
“The individual primary paper is not the final form of the consensus but it is the brick from which the whole edifice is to be built.”4
“Research scientists are trained to produce specialised bricks of knowledge, but not to look at the whole building.”5
“We speak piously of taking measurements and making small studies that will ‘add another brick to the temple of science.’ Most such bricks just lie around the brickyard.”6
“Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of bricks; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of bricks is a house.”2
“Authors view acceptance of …