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.
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.
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.
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.