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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Source: The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete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: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday April 10 2018, @12:26PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday April 10 2018, @12:26PM (#664914)

    The "International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology", which has been described for obvious reasons as an outlet that will publish just about anything for a fee.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
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