One of the arguments for rigid style, which is dispositive in my experience, is collaborative writing. When there are multiple authors, contributing to both the writing itself and to the editing of each other’s writing, it is just much easier if everyone converges quickly on one style, and the Schelling point is IMRAD (with some leeway about where the M appears). Everyone writing the paper already knows how to write in IMRAD, and how to edit a paper written IMRAD.
Since the number of authors per paper has also steadily increased over time, this would further consolidate IMRAD as a standard.
I would put it this way: we have cut most of the useful information (inspiration, project history, unknowns, intuitions & opinions,
creative speculation) out of the papers.
Papers do not link to blogs so the web of citations is sparse and misleading, and it will usually lead you nowhere fast.
(As an aside, something that could absolutely revolutionize science: if authors could put up a flag "this is crap please do not follow me down this barren path" after a paper got accepted and cited a couple times.)
Or more generally if you were able to add more free thoughts after acceptance.
One perfect example of "style" is the sentence from the one-page paper in Nature 1953 from Watson/Crick announcing the double helix: “It has not escaped our notice that the structure we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”
What about the reader's perspective? The increasing burden of knowledge means that researchers in a field need to have familiarity with a lot of existing work, and anecdotally people have developed strategies for getting through that quickly that rely on a standardization like IMRAD ("read 100% of abstracts, 75% of results sections, 5% of methods sections" or whatever). If everyone did their own thing, reading might be more interesting but it would be slower, so it would be even harder to get to the knowledge frontier.
Great usage of turgid….you could argue argue they go hand in hand, its easy not to think about style when you dont have to think about overall structure in any kind of significant way
I was a graduate student in the late 1980s, and I had to present a paper at a journal club. I think the paper concerned finding a gene for some particular disorder (I might be getting the details wrong here). I couldn't figure out how the authors knew to look for the gene on a specific chromosome. I asked one of my professors, and she said that it was sheer good luck that the gene was in the first place they looked. But nothing in the paper admitted to that fact. Seems dishonest not to acknowledge that they were lucky.
Excellent essay :-) I, for one, didn't know that, of all A. Einstein's papers, only one was "peer reviewed"! This would be unthinkable nowadays ;-) Nobel Laureate Roger Tsien liked to say that it baffled people to know that his Nobel prize-winning discovery was "only a JBC paper".
In favor of the rigid, standard style - I believe it levels the field, as it makes it universally understood. Especially for non-native English speaking scientists, like myself. Setting aside considerations as to how it has come to be, or whether it is fair or not... English is the universal language for science, understood as the application of the scientific method. We may then use our own languages for artistic, subjective, individual expression... But for science to continue to be universal, each term must mean the same for everybody.
You should read Darwin -- you would be pleasantly surprised. From my copy of _The Journey of the Beagle_:
1. He admits doesn't know what the hell is going on.
> Along the whole coast of Brazil, for a length of at least 2000 miles, and certainly for a considerable space inland, wherever solid rock occurs, it belongs to a granitic formation. The circumstance of this enormous area being constituted of materials which most geologists believe to have been crystallized when heated under pressure, gives rise to many curious reflections. Was this effect produced beneath the depths of a profound ocean? or did a covering of strata formerly extend over it, which has since been removed? Can we believe that any power, acting for a time short of infinity, could have denuded the granite over so many thousand square leagues?
2. He gets excited and uses italics (and exclamation marks!).
> It is known that earthquakes frequently cause masses of earth to fall from sea-cliffs: how terrific, then, would be the effect of a severe shock (and such occur here) on a body like a glacier, already in motion, and traversed by fissures! I can readily believe that the water would be fairly beaten back out of the deepest channel, and then returning with an overwhelming force, would whirl about huge masses of rock like so much chaff. In Eyre's sound [...] about fifty icebergs were seen at one time floating outwards, and one of them must have been _at least_ 168 feet in total height. [...] The position of the glaciers at this place and in the Gulf of Penas, may be put even in a more striking point of view, for they descend to the sea-coast, within 7 1/2° of latitude, or 450 miles, of a harbour, where three species of Oliva, a Voluta, and a Terebra, are the commonest shells, within less than 9° from where palms grow, within 4 1/2° of a region where the jaguar and puma range over the plains, less than 2 1/2° from arborescent grasses, and (looking to the westward in the same hemisphere) less than 2° from orchideous parasites, and within a single degree of tree-ferns!
3. He writes charming descriptions. An example, in case the previous two failed to convince you of this point:
> When we reached the crest [of the Pequenes mountain range] and looked bakwards, a glorious view was presented. The atmosphere resplendently clear; the sky an intense blue; the profound valleys; the wild broken forms; the heaps of ruins, piled up during the lapse of ages; the bright-coloured rocks, contrasted with the quiet mountains of snow; all these together produced a scene no one could have imagined.
In fact, these examples only begin to capture the strengths of Darwin's style. Other qualities of his writing that I wish more modern science shared:
4. He tells incredible stories. He describes natural disasters, people and their actions, and his own wild experiments in narrative form. His books contain no small amount of myth and hearsay. Beyond contributing to the overall sense of wonder his books instill in the reader, the stories make the book more approachable and his theories and explanations more clear.
5. He covers an incredible breadth of content. He switches from topic to topic, going from describing the curious habits of birds with very erect tails to spiders flying by their webs to ancient geological processes in the span of pages.
6. On a similar note, he does not limit himself to 'scientific' content alone. _The Journey of the Beagle_ includes no small amount of social commentary, including condemnations of both the ongoing brutal war against the natives and the practice of slavery. The economic conditions of workers in Chilean mines are described in detail, as are the feudal systems of government on the outskirts of society. While I don't think social commentary ought to be shoehorned into scientific writing, it's equally as important to include it where it is relevant. Darwin's credibility is improved by his humanity and his clear sense of justice, which shines through every word he writes on class and power.
7. He adds jokes!
> My host, the superintendent of the mine, was a shrewd but rather ignorant Cornish miner. [...] Amongst many other questions, he asked me, 'Now that George Rex is dead, how many more of the family of Rexes are yet alive?' This Rex certainly must be a relation of the great author Finis, who wrote all books!
I hope that these examples suffice to demonstrate that Darwin is not the villain of mundane scientific writing that this article makes him out to be. A passion for clarity and fascination with the world are essential for good scientific writing, and Darwin's books are positively dripping with both. His advice to "throw eloquence to the dogs" should be taken not as a stance against good writing. but against filler and cruft. If modern scientific writing is bad, it is not because Darwin "got his way", but because scientists have lost theirs.
I feel the drop of the author as a character was due to the shift from hierarchical and xenophobic and writing centric British education and US as a melting pot with poor writing training and skills.
In Britain, a Victorian ideal has been to become an Oxbridge professor and spread your wings and study other subjects. Gresham college embodies this erudite ideal of both research and education through narrative.
Post "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material" (1953) there was a seismic shift. The number of U.S. based research projects and journals exploded.
U.S. focused on product over style. To get there, it created pipelines pulling in researchers from other lands, and there were no incentives for style. To a polyglot audience, •taking the piss• is not just inappropriate and unfocused but dangerously unclear.
Compare a reductionist view of a British and American student writing this first published paper. The Brit is terrified she will be called out in her field and humiliated by peers. The American is braver but simply doesn’t know how to write a paper.
there is probably some truth to this, but I think the stylistic shift was still largely due to intrinsic scaling effects of high-throughput publishing, i.e. even if Britain became the world's pre-eminent scientific and publishing power the same shift would have occurred eventually. (this is the author speaking btw, as if it matters...)
Where the Brits had Oxbridge, we had the NIH. I blame the rigid page limits in grant applications even more than those in published papers. During grad school we had no formal, program-wide sessions in writing, except those where we reviewed the faculty's own grant applications, to copy the successful ones and steer away from whatever the others were doing.
If you've ever done grant review (at least during the early 2000s, like me), most applications get no discussion at all. We call that 'triage'. The very top ones are also agreed upon quickly, by those people who were assigned to read them, and everyone else goes along after their summary presentation. The borderline cases near the payline get the most discussion.
As above, what I hated was the idea that I needed to be a cog in the machine, interchangeable with all the other cogs, and that my writing needed to be indistinguishable from theirs. As a grad student, I was told to leave out personal thoughts and details even in the papers we submitted for classes.
The Tick, talking science with his sidekick Arthur after a visit to the super-hero old folks' home, where Arthur complains about atomic zombie men:
It's not even the brevity that's the worst aspect, in my opinion. It's the insistence on passive voice and other ways of trying to pretend that the author is a faceless automaton. They actually increase the word count. Not in the simplest case of 'We did this' vs. 'This was done,' but on average . . .
One of many reasons I haven't written a scientific paper in over ten years. Another being all my scientific citations together total less than one week's worth of readers for my newsletter.
Really enjoyed this! I am a scientist and also a poet, so I enjoy metaphor and descriptive language. On my first publication I was dinged by peer reviewers for some flowery language, which they saw as imprecise. I removed it but was annoyed.
Now I am writing my PhD dissertation and my advisor has given me some leeway to be a little more creative and narrative in my writing, which makes me quite happy!
One aspect you overlooked, and which some others here mentioned, is the prevalence of international students/ESLs in academia. While the initial adoption might have been to expedite the publishing process via a lifeless clarity of language and bulwark it against shoddy research with peer review, the sheer and overwhelming quantity of researchers from places like China, South America and Eastern Europe has essentially locked us into this unfortunate position of having soulless and cadaverous prose as the standard--coupled with the fact that many labs are present in universities in those nations and are publishing papers in English in English-language journals. As such, it is unfortunately rather unlikely that any great waves of change will wash away the detritus and filth of academia's love affair with HR-speak, lest unbounded legions of angry ESLs protest the sudden loss of comprehensibility. It's a classic case where the sheer hegemonic prevalence of the current institution can only be overthrown by the ascendency of parallel institutions. What baffles me is the mindset of these ivory tower hegemons. How can they despise life and beauty in language so much? Have they no taste whatsoever for anything aesthetically pleasing? Perhaps they have simply been brow-beaten from all the long years around brutalist architecture and engaging with the monotony of the literature, and take ugliness as the default state of all human affairs.
Good article. I was wondering: how do laypeople like me gain access to scientific papers? It's easier to (for instance) write sci-fi when you have proper research material.
One of the arguments for rigid style, which is dispositive in my experience, is collaborative writing. When there are multiple authors, contributing to both the writing itself and to the editing of each other’s writing, it is just much easier if everyone converges quickly on one style, and the Schelling point is IMRAD (with some leeway about where the M appears). Everyone writing the paper already knows how to write in IMRAD, and how to edit a paper written IMRAD.
Since the number of authors per paper has also steadily increased over time, this would further consolidate IMRAD as a standard.
It's a great point, one that definitely would have been good to touch on in the essay :)
I would put it this way: we have cut most of the useful information (inspiration, project history, unknowns, intuitions & opinions,
creative speculation) out of the papers.
Papers do not link to blogs so the web of citations is sparse and misleading, and it will usually lead you nowhere fast.
(As an aside, something that could absolutely revolutionize science: if authors could put up a flag "this is crap please do not follow me down this barren path" after a paper got accepted and cited a couple times.)
Or more generally if you were able to add more free thoughts after acceptance.
Put the important stuff back in papers!
well said!
One perfect example of "style" is the sentence from the one-page paper in Nature 1953 from Watson/Crick announcing the double helix: “It has not escaped our notice that the structure we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”
What about the reader's perspective? The increasing burden of knowledge means that researchers in a field need to have familiarity with a lot of existing work, and anecdotally people have developed strategies for getting through that quickly that rely on a standardization like IMRAD ("read 100% of abstracts, 75% of results sections, 5% of methods sections" or whatever). If everyone did their own thing, reading might be more interesting but it would be slower, so it would be even harder to get to the knowledge frontier.
Oh, don't worry, AI summaries will mean that nobody actually reads anything, ever.
I don't mind the IMRAD format, it's the turgid unreadable prose that's the killer.
Great usage of turgid….you could argue argue they go hand in hand, its easy not to think about style when you dont have to think about overall structure in any kind of significant way
I was a graduate student in the late 1980s, and I had to present a paper at a journal club. I think the paper concerned finding a gene for some particular disorder (I might be getting the details wrong here). I couldn't figure out how the authors knew to look for the gene on a specific chromosome. I asked one of my professors, and she said that it was sheer good luck that the gene was in the first place they looked. But nothing in the paper admitted to that fact. Seems dishonest not to acknowledge that they were lucky.
Or that they just left out all the negative results, which is a whole other issue.
https://www.enago.com/academy/top-10-journals-publish-negative-results/
I think you need to read some medical papers: https://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f7198
Excellent essay :-) I, for one, didn't know that, of all A. Einstein's papers, only one was "peer reviewed"! This would be unthinkable nowadays ;-) Nobel Laureate Roger Tsien liked to say that it baffled people to know that his Nobel prize-winning discovery was "only a JBC paper".
In favor of the rigid, standard style - I believe it levels the field, as it makes it universally understood. Especially for non-native English speaking scientists, like myself. Setting aside considerations as to how it has come to be, or whether it is fair or not... English is the universal language for science, understood as the application of the scientific method. We may then use our own languages for artistic, subjective, individual expression... But for science to continue to be universal, each term must mean the same for everybody.
You should read Darwin -- you would be pleasantly surprised. From my copy of _The Journey of the Beagle_:
1. He admits doesn't know what the hell is going on.
> Along the whole coast of Brazil, for a length of at least 2000 miles, and certainly for a considerable space inland, wherever solid rock occurs, it belongs to a granitic formation. The circumstance of this enormous area being constituted of materials which most geologists believe to have been crystallized when heated under pressure, gives rise to many curious reflections. Was this effect produced beneath the depths of a profound ocean? or did a covering of strata formerly extend over it, which has since been removed? Can we believe that any power, acting for a time short of infinity, could have denuded the granite over so many thousand square leagues?
2. He gets excited and uses italics (and exclamation marks!).
> It is known that earthquakes frequently cause masses of earth to fall from sea-cliffs: how terrific, then, would be the effect of a severe shock (and such occur here) on a body like a glacier, already in motion, and traversed by fissures! I can readily believe that the water would be fairly beaten back out of the deepest channel, and then returning with an overwhelming force, would whirl about huge masses of rock like so much chaff. In Eyre's sound [...] about fifty icebergs were seen at one time floating outwards, and one of them must have been _at least_ 168 feet in total height. [...] The position of the glaciers at this place and in the Gulf of Penas, may be put even in a more striking point of view, for they descend to the sea-coast, within 7 1/2° of latitude, or 450 miles, of a harbour, where three species of Oliva, a Voluta, and a Terebra, are the commonest shells, within less than 9° from where palms grow, within 4 1/2° of a region where the jaguar and puma range over the plains, less than 2 1/2° from arborescent grasses, and (looking to the westward in the same hemisphere) less than 2° from orchideous parasites, and within a single degree of tree-ferns!
3. He writes charming descriptions. An example, in case the previous two failed to convince you of this point:
> When we reached the crest [of the Pequenes mountain range] and looked bakwards, a glorious view was presented. The atmosphere resplendently clear; the sky an intense blue; the profound valleys; the wild broken forms; the heaps of ruins, piled up during the lapse of ages; the bright-coloured rocks, contrasted with the quiet mountains of snow; all these together produced a scene no one could have imagined.
In fact, these examples only begin to capture the strengths of Darwin's style. Other qualities of his writing that I wish more modern science shared:
4. He tells incredible stories. He describes natural disasters, people and their actions, and his own wild experiments in narrative form. His books contain no small amount of myth and hearsay. Beyond contributing to the overall sense of wonder his books instill in the reader, the stories make the book more approachable and his theories and explanations more clear.
5. He covers an incredible breadth of content. He switches from topic to topic, going from describing the curious habits of birds with very erect tails to spiders flying by their webs to ancient geological processes in the span of pages.
6. On a similar note, he does not limit himself to 'scientific' content alone. _The Journey of the Beagle_ includes no small amount of social commentary, including condemnations of both the ongoing brutal war against the natives and the practice of slavery. The economic conditions of workers in Chilean mines are described in detail, as are the feudal systems of government on the outskirts of society. While I don't think social commentary ought to be shoehorned into scientific writing, it's equally as important to include it where it is relevant. Darwin's credibility is improved by his humanity and his clear sense of justice, which shines through every word he writes on class and power.
7. He adds jokes!
> My host, the superintendent of the mine, was a shrewd but rather ignorant Cornish miner. [...] Amongst many other questions, he asked me, 'Now that George Rex is dead, how many more of the family of Rexes are yet alive?' This Rex certainly must be a relation of the great author Finis, who wrote all books!
I hope that these examples suffice to demonstrate that Darwin is not the villain of mundane scientific writing that this article makes him out to be. A passion for clarity and fascination with the world are essential for good scientific writing, and Darwin's books are positively dripping with both. His advice to "throw eloquence to the dogs" should be taken not as a stance against good writing. but against filler and cruft. If modern scientific writing is bad, it is not because Darwin "got his way", but because scientists have lost theirs.
I feel the drop of the author as a character was due to the shift from hierarchical and xenophobic and writing centric British education and US as a melting pot with poor writing training and skills.
In Britain, a Victorian ideal has been to become an Oxbridge professor and spread your wings and study other subjects. Gresham college embodies this erudite ideal of both research and education through narrative.
Post "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material" (1953) there was a seismic shift. The number of U.S. based research projects and journals exploded.
U.S. focused on product over style. To get there, it created pipelines pulling in researchers from other lands, and there were no incentives for style. To a polyglot audience, •taking the piss• is not just inappropriate and unfocused but dangerously unclear.
Compare a reductionist view of a British and American student writing this first published paper. The Brit is terrified she will be called out in her field and humiliated by peers. The American is braver but simply doesn’t know how to write a paper.
edited to correct an autocorrect change
there is probably some truth to this, but I think the stylistic shift was still largely due to intrinsic scaling effects of high-throughput publishing, i.e. even if Britain became the world's pre-eminent scientific and publishing power the same shift would have occurred eventually. (this is the author speaking btw, as if it matters...)
Where the Brits had Oxbridge, we had the NIH. I blame the rigid page limits in grant applications even more than those in published papers. During grad school we had no formal, program-wide sessions in writing, except those where we reviewed the faculty's own grant applications, to copy the successful ones and steer away from whatever the others were doing.
If you've ever done grant review (at least during the early 2000s, like me), most applications get no discussion at all. We call that 'triage'. The very top ones are also agreed upon quickly, by those people who were assigned to read them, and everyone else goes along after their summary presentation. The borderline cases near the payline get the most discussion.
As above, what I hated was the idea that I needed to be a cog in the machine, interchangeable with all the other cogs, and that my writing needed to be indistinguishable from theirs. As a grad student, I was told to leave out personal thoughts and details even in the papers we submitted for classes.
The Tick, talking science with his sidekick Arthur after a visit to the super-hero old folks' home, where Arthur complains about atomic zombie men:
https://clip.cafe/the-tick-1994/arthur-have-no-historical-perspective/?srsltid=AfmBOopmfK_whzrW31ULUoR7o6iwZKsBAZ-HKp_8fwkpD47au7p4QZpW
It's not even the brevity that's the worst aspect, in my opinion. It's the insistence on passive voice and other ways of trying to pretend that the author is a faceless automaton. They actually increase the word count. Not in the simplest case of 'We did this' vs. 'This was done,' but on average . . .
One of many reasons I haven't written a scientific paper in over ten years. Another being all my scientific citations together total less than one week's worth of readers for my newsletter.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=uWZ5lvsAAAAJ&hl=en
Really enjoyed this! I am a scientist and also a poet, so I enjoy metaphor and descriptive language. On my first publication I was dinged by peer reviewers for some flowery language, which they saw as imprecise. I removed it but was annoyed.
Now I am writing my PhD dissertation and my advisor has given me some leeway to be a little more creative and narrative in my writing, which makes me quite happy!
One aspect you overlooked, and which some others here mentioned, is the prevalence of international students/ESLs in academia. While the initial adoption might have been to expedite the publishing process via a lifeless clarity of language and bulwark it against shoddy research with peer review, the sheer and overwhelming quantity of researchers from places like China, South America and Eastern Europe has essentially locked us into this unfortunate position of having soulless and cadaverous prose as the standard--coupled with the fact that many labs are present in universities in those nations and are publishing papers in English in English-language journals. As such, it is unfortunately rather unlikely that any great waves of change will wash away the detritus and filth of academia's love affair with HR-speak, lest unbounded legions of angry ESLs protest the sudden loss of comprehensibility. It's a classic case where the sheer hegemonic prevalence of the current institution can only be overthrown by the ascendency of parallel institutions. What baffles me is the mindset of these ivory tower hegemons. How can they despise life and beauty in language so much? Have they no taste whatsoever for anything aesthetically pleasing? Perhaps they have simply been brow-beaten from all the long years around brutalist architecture and engaging with the monotony of the literature, and take ugliness as the default state of all human affairs.
Good article. I was wondering: how do laypeople like me gain access to scientific papers? It's easier to (for instance) write sci-fi when you have proper research material.