Why were early 20th century scientific journals printed in katakana?


[![enter image description
here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cuerq.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cuerq.jpg)

I don’t know if this is something specific to botanical journals or scientific
journals in general. A lot of the botanical publications in this period use
katakana instead of hiragana. The picture above is from the 1927 edition of
the Journal of Japanese Botany. Almost all of the body text is like this. The
last edition of this specific journal that I can find with katakana body text
is the 1943 edition, and then it becomes hiragana in the 1948 edition.

