Generally, I don't particularly appreciate how unreadable academic articles are. It makes them ineffective at communicating their ideas. And worse - there are a lot of pieces where jargon is used as a substitute for content.
Yes, it's not unexpectedly complex for a science paper. But like many academic papers, it is needlessly complex. As I've shown, you can mostly restate a technical paragraph with two plain English sentences.
I often wonder - would it be that difficult to present academic writings in simple English, or at least to provide a plain English abstract? Publishing a paper takes months; what're the extra 10 minutes to make it more effective and readable?
Slightly off topic, but I wish there was a change to how scientific papers were written (and this comment doesn't pertain to this article - it's just a general comment). For some, inexplicable reason, it sometimes feels like authors are challenging one another to write the most convoluted, unclear account of what is actually a fairly intuitive idea.
Clearly, this is not always the case, and obviously complexity doesn't lend itself to nice 10 word summaries (hat-tip to Jed Bartlet), but equally the choice of language used and the pace of arguments can make a huge difference. There is no need to use "big" words, when simple ones will do just fine. There is no need to use technical language in place of standard vocabulary where it adds nothing to further your ideas. Don't "hit the ground running" but introduce a new idea with an analogy, or a toy example.
Write papers so humans can understand them - often the science being portrayed is complicated enough, there's no need to further complicate your ideas to the point where you leave English speaking audiences trying to decipher the message, let alone what foreign readers must think.
The best papers are the papers you can read abstract-to-conclusion without stopping and asking yourself, "What does that mean?". This is all too rare an occurrence for me. /rant
It does seem the prevailing writing style of academia is a big part of the problem. Papers a lot of time leave the reader feeling stupid. “Surely there’s wisdom here!?” the reader hopes. Maybe if papers taught the underlying concepts in a clearer, more transparent way we’d get better, more reproducible science
Speaking of academic papers, I'd love to see a focus on readability.
So many papers are just too dense for readers outside of the specific field. This can be because of the complexity of the subject matter, but I often notice unnecessary specific vocabulary and over-complicating concepts.
Because of this, it's impractical for the layman to go read academic papers outside of their field. This leads to reading some news article that attempts to summarize it, and we all know that majority of the time it's just the headline that gets read.
That's a start but doesn't go nearly far enough to relieve the burden of reading papers that researchers have to suffer through. An abstract usually has a high density jargon and undefined terms that are specific to the niche they're working in. What's easy to read is news articles that are based on scientific papers. The fact that journalists write articles instead of just copying and pasting the abstract shows that abstracts aren't very readable.
Also, once you're past the abstract, it's still heavy going. Compare that to text books which tend to be a bit easier to follow.
I'm not saying these are the answers. Just highlighting the problem of readability. That seems more serious than not having a space between a unit and a number, or a formula having a disproportionately big fraction. Even more important than spelling and grammar which humans can mostly correct as they go.
Most papers don't deserve to be in textbooks, as they are of very minor interest by themselves. Textbooks distill the fundamental bits.
I agree with your other points, and many authors do work hard to give an intuitive description. Intuitive, that is, to a reader skilled in the art.
But don't think that just because you don't understand a paper that means it is overly complicated or obtuse. It might be perfectly compact and straightforward if you are familiar with the field and its conventions and notation. And this is the most efficient way to communicate.
Of course, some researchers just suck at writing. A few might even be trying to sound fancy and make things sound complicated or high-falutin'. Grad students start out with this tendency, but we try to beat it out of them ASAP. Some are never redeemed. But I like to think my group produces readable papers.
That's fascinating; thank you for that. I often find academic papers are too densely written to me to read, but the authors of that paper have gone out of their way to describe everything in a straightforward manner.
It's pretty clearly worded to me. That's the trouble with widely releasing research. It's generally (and, IMO, correctly) written in a specific language for a specific audience who can parse this. This is necessary because communicating research has to be extremely precise, but difficult because it requires training.
In my senior year as an undergrad, it would take me 3-5 days to get through a paper and really understand it, and had entire classes that were based around understanding primary literature. In my first year of grad school I was reading dozens of papers in a month. This precise language is needed for replication (despite academic science being structurally unsuited to it) and hi-fidelity idea transmission, but is unsuitable for wider distribution because of the language.
We need more skilled science communicators, not more *arxivs.
While true, scientific papers are written with an aim to be reasonably easy to parse. Turning scientific papers into literary works is likely to fail (novelty bits aside), same as it fails in business settings etc. We already have pretty streamlined language because people demand it in a lot of places - LLMs will accelerate that because it reduces the effort to get there.
If you are tech illiterate then it doesn't matter if you have access or not to the scientific literature, it is hard enough to follow for people that are tech literate and this doesn't always seem to be by accident.
Almost every paper that I've seen could have been more direct, less obtuse and more transparent, especially when it comes to the presentation of evidence that is in doubt or marginal.
If you read papers from the beginnings of science they are such a breath of fresh air compared to the stuff that is produced today. There are some exceptions but they are few and far between.
Obviously science itself has developed, things have gotten far more complex and so on. But that's not really my point, the point is about the language used itself, which seems to be more related to attracting the next round of funding than it is to moving the needle in a scientific way. And those papers that do end up moving the needle tend to be remarkably blunt and precise in their findings.
There is a parallel here between scientific papers and start-up decks. Those start-ups and those scientists that know they have a live one don't need to fluff it up or polish the numbers, they can just present the cold hard truth and you will know it for what it spells out when you read it without any kind of embellishment.
This is a little exaggerated. Most papers have to be somewhat readable to be accepted into journals and notable conferences. The fact that the layman cannot understand an advanced biology paper is nothing new. I'd wager the scientific paper "golden age" the author cites as having such readable papers were not very readable for the general public of the time. It's just we are taught those things in elementary school and so can see the concepts in those older papers much better than the people of the time can.
So, which papers are they citing as "needlessly complex"? Or, to be more precise, which papers are "needlessly complex", and which ones are "justified complex"? FTA:
> Bosley (...) says that academic prose is often so riddled with professional jargon and needlessly complex syntax that even someone with a Ph.D. can’t understand a fellow Ph.D.’s work unless he or she comes from the very same discipline.
That doesn't necessarily mean that the article is "needlessly complex", it could also mean that the article deals with a complex topic, and therefore will be complex to read if you are not up to date with the topic. An article that makes no previous assumptions is ultimately called a book, and runs hundreds of pages long, as opposed to an 8-pages scientific article. Or, to make an analogy, it's not intended to be the full source code but a diff to previous research.
Of course, there is some bad writing around (like the IG Nobel prize, where students use longer words just because they can). But to claim that it makes for a majority of writing seems to me like a stretch.
The above statement is true with the assumption that the topic being discussed is truly above the level of understanding for undergraduates. For the majority of the papers, that assumption is not true though. Papers are hard to read has more to do with the idea that if it's not filled with jargons, its chance of getting published is greatly reduced.
Papers are not rewarded for being easy to understand. People/organizations get rewarded for publishing "complicate" papers. That misalignment is the issue.
As someone who has become practiced in parsing scientific papers, I do not actually think the format is a very good one. If you are not a sub-domain expert it is IMO much easier to get up-to-speed by reading a tangentially-relevant PhD Thesis or two than by reading even Review papers.
> a single sentence may be unpacked on multiple levels because the reader/audience for the paper is someone who has a deep background in the subject.
This supposed information density is often a pretext for obfuscation, though. The author is essentially hostile to the reader, fighting a vicious obfuscatory rear-guard action against their comprehension of anything beyond the conclusion they're meant to cite or the technique they're meant to implement (and cite).
I often wonder whether I found student theses so much more helpful because they're long-form, or because either idealism or a less-developed sense of the threshold of acceptable bullshit they can get away with leads them to present their claims and process more clearly.
That's normal, most papers are written unnecessarily complex, likely to make them appear more impressive than they actually are. Many blog posts that contain just as much information as papers, but presented in a much more intelligible way.
From my perspective as an outsider, I have always been amazed by the use of papers in academic research as a means of communicating findings to the wider world. I find it problematic that these papers are often formatted in a way that makes them highly unreadable, with two columns and compressed text. In my opinion, adopting more modern methods of publishing research could greatly enhance the overall quality of research by making papers more accessible and increasing the likelihood of them being read.
Imagine a scenario where there is a standardized format for academic papers, where the conclusion is explicitly derived from specific data and accompanied by confidence intervals. This standardized schema would enable easier referencing of other papers and easy incorporation of additional data through features like autocomplete. Implementing such a system could potentially reverse the trend of academic papers that use excessive and unnecessary language to appear more intellectually rigorous, even when the actual information being conveyed is limited.
By embracing these changes, we could create a more transparent and efficient research environment that promotes clearer communication and enhances the impact of academic findings.
To be fair most papers are written for readers that have the exact same viewpoint and specialty. So they are incredibly difficult to parse for people in the same field but a different sub specialty.
I think many more papers would be read if authors invested more time in learning how to write.
Academic papers can seem incredibly intimidating but you have to remember: they're not written to be readable to the casual reader unlike articles on the web.
Journals have strict page limits so there's no space to introduce domain specific terminology or give a brief tutorial on the topic. They only have enough room to tersely describe directly relevant background material and will assume you are knowledgable in the domain.
Read the abstract then the conclusion. If it sounds like you want to understand the rest of the paper after that, be prepared to look up terminology, read citations, follow tutorials and reread the paper multiple times to really understand it. Don't be put off if you can barely understand it the first time.
Interesting. Do you know of any popular science articles or books that can describe what you're talking about? Academic papers are fine too, just harder to parse.
Yes, it's not unexpectedly complex for a science paper. But like many academic papers, it is needlessly complex. As I've shown, you can mostly restate a technical paragraph with two plain English sentences.
I often wonder - would it be that difficult to present academic writings in simple English, or at least to provide a plain English abstract? Publishing a paper takes months; what're the extra 10 minutes to make it more effective and readable?
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