“It is also worth considering the importance of comprehensibility of scientific texts in light of the recent controversy regarding the reproducibility of science,” they add. “Reproducibility requires that findings can be verified independently. To achieve this, reporting of methods and results must be sufficiently understandable.”To which the authors of several recent articles replied, "Your tiny minds cannot hope to refute our elite brilliance. You must bow to the science, and send us more grant money."
You may be onto something
A NatureIndex article explores the problem that "scientific" writing is increasingly impenetrable.
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6 comments:
Two things dominate this. Specialization and familiarity.
The specialist has to create new terms (or, Heaven help us, re-use old ones) to describe the new things he is studying. To keep under the paper's word count, he uses those specialized terms and trusts that the novice will go look them up (but where!?? Dictionaries are scarce, and quickly outdated).
This drives me nuts sometimes. There's a report of some math result that sounds interesting, but when I go look it up the first few sentences send me off on a chain of references before I even begin to have some notion of what the first paragraph is about. Unavoidable, unfortunately.
Familiarity also curses papers. A tool you use every day--almost like breathing--may not be widely known, but because it is transparent to you you don't realize it needs explanation. That can be fixed with education and hard-nosed editors.
Years ago I proposed that every PhD student be required to produce a "poster-session" web page version of his thesis aimed at a high-school audience. That seemed like a win-win: science outreach and training the student to be able to explain.
Unfortunately, after trying it out on a few things, I realized that each simple page would demand a library of explanatory pages. If a student's thesis was on the transverse momentum of pions from a e+e- collider, it would need background explanation of what an electron is, what a pion is, what momentum is, what a vector is, and why this all might be important--which demands an even more extensive web library.
I'll cut some slack for people whose papers are impenetrable because they are genuinely high-level and specialized. That's not what this article was about.
Besides, even a high-level study can probably benefit from a clear writing style and a genuine desire to avoid hiding behind inscrutibility.
The other problem arises from people who choose to attack those who use original definitions and meanings and adore those who invent novel individualized definitions and meanings -- for the same old words.
2+2 = 5. For new values of "2" which are also allowed to be distinct on either side of the " + " sign. And by the way " + " should not be limited to simple accumulation of quantities. And "5" may or may not inherit the value and privileges it enjoyed under the last century's patriarchy ...
I agree about clearer writing. FWIW, sometimes what you see _is_ the clearer version, after a colleague whose first language is English has tidied it up a bit.
I was quite proud of the fact that everyone on my dissertation committee complimented the quality of the writing. And that when my post-doc research was published, the editor didn't have to do much more than typo hunt. "Wow, this is a good read!" Granted, having a good topic helped a great deal.
On the other hand, I've read academic historians who can make reading about Pearl Harbor mind-killingly dull. That's deliberate on their part, because for a while, "too exciting" was a kiss-of-death for academic publication.
"The other problem arises from people who choose to attack those who use original definitions and meanings and adore those who invent novel individualized definitions and meanings -- for the same old words."
This exactly. When we were doing thesis in architecture school, the thing to do was invent a new term and work it for all it was worth- when it could have been explained using existing terms. It's marketing techniques brought to academia, and it's a cancer.
Originality is over-rated. It should be not only perfectly acceptable, but given the same status as originality to study something and confirm it a different way, or to expand on existing ideas. The question of quality should rest on the quality of the work, not it's 'inventiveness' quotient.
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