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posted by mrpg on Monday April 09 2018, @01:38PM   Printer-friendly
from the that-word-again dept.

The scientific paper—the actual form of it—was one of the enabling inventions of modernity. Before it was developed in the 1600s, results were communicated privately in letters, ephemerally in lectures, or all at once in books. There was no public forum for incremental advances. By making room for reports of single experiments or minor technical advances, journals made the chaos of science accretive. Scientists from that point forward became like the social insects: They made their progress steadily, as a buzzing mass.

The earliest papers were in some ways more readable than papers are today. They were less specialized, more direct, shorter, and far less formal. Calculus had only just been invented. Entire data sets could fit in a table on a single page. What little "computation" contributed to the results was done by hand and could be verified in the same way.

The more sophisticated science becomes, the harder it is to communicate results. Papers today are longer than ever and full of jargon and symbols. They depend on chains of computer programs that generate data, and clean up data, and plot data, and run statistical models on data. These programs tend to be both so sloppily written and so central to the results that it's contributed to a replication crisis, or put another way, a failure of the paper to perform its most basic task: to report what you've actually discovered, clearly enough that someone else can discover it for themselves.

Source: The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by rleigh on Monday April 09 2018, @08:09PM (1 child)

    by rleigh (4887) on Monday April 09 2018, @08:09PM (#664642) Homepage

    While I can't fault Mathematica for its incredible interactive facilities, any replacement for the existing publishing model of paper (PDF) plus any extra data must be open and future-proof or it will hold little long-term value. Interactive visualisation of dynamic processes is fine, but we have been able to visualise these in time-lapse figures for centuries. The problem isn't necessarily the visualisation, it's the space constraints journals impose which prevent the use of explanatory diagrams and the desperate cramming of several experiments into subfigures of a single figure often to the detriment of the information being conveyed. Since the vast majority of papers are read online nowadays, rather than being read in a physical paper copy, I don't think the tight space constraints are strictly necessary. What is currently moved into "supplementary material" is often the meat of the research, with the "paper" being little more than promotional text for the real work which couldn't be fitted into the restrictive format of a paper. They are so short the methods and results are a pale imitation of the real work and data which was collected; with the space limitations removed, there's no reason not to have the full methods included as well as all the data.

    My main problem with many papers is the access to the raw data is not always guaranteed. For some it may be in a repository of some sort, but not all data is, or is easily accessible. I think every figure in every paper should link back to the raw data and the code which generated it. IPython notebooks are a step forward, but I'm still unconvinced of their long-term usefulness. Many will no longer work in 5 years, let along 5 decades.

    They are also correct in older papers being more readable. When I was doing my PhD I found many papers so dry and boring I'd literally doze off before I'd finished the introduction. My favourite paper which I cited was http://science.sciencemag.org/content/44/1127/145 [sciencemag.org] by Florence Sabin back from 1916. Plain text and some line drawings, but so interesting I was engaged and excited to read it. Rather than the abstract and disinterested third person, it was all written in the first person, with their thoughts and motivations written in alongside the experimental methods and results. It made a huge difference in my appreciation of the science, reading a paper not apparently written by robots, and accessible to both experts and laymen alike. While I think that too much of the first person would detract, today's rigidly formal style is (IMO) getting in the way of effectively communicating one's work to a wider audience, and there's also a lot of jargon for the sake of making things appearing more impressive than they really are. It wasn't always this way, and I think it would help to revisit what we have lost.

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  • (Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday April 12 2018, @02:49PM

    by Wootery (2341) on Thursday April 12 2018, @02:49PM (#665949)

    Rather than the abstract and disinterested third person, it was all written in the first person, with their thoughts and motivations written in alongside the experimental methods and results. It made a huge difference in my appreciation of the science, reading a paper not apparently written by robots, and accessible to both experts and laymen alike.

    This is why there's so much value in explanatory blog posts and videos. To someone who doesn't already understand the field, a good blog tutorial can be more useful, and far more approachable, than the original publication.

    Endless dry formulae are not a good way to convey intuition.