Building a metaphor: Another brick in the wall?

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 allegory 1 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 a manuscript as the completion of a piece of work-but for the research content of the paper, it is only the beginning. To contribute to the research enterprise, other investigators need to take the findings and build on them. But the construction of science requires solid bricks, not cardboard." 7

"And then it came to pass that a misunderstanding spread among the brickmakers . . . The brickmakers became obsessed with the making of bricks. When reminded that the ultimate goal was edifices, not bricks, they replied that, if enough bricks were available, the builders would be able to select what was necessary and still continue to construct edifices." 1

"It became difficult to find the proper bricks for a task because one had to hunt among so many. It became...