There are several reasons for this, including the difficulty of accessing papers that lie behind the paywalls of large publishing companies and the extreme specialization of most academic articles, which limits their appeal. Also, scientific topics are often complex, and it’s generally not worth spending time and energy to understand a technical argument unless it’s particularly germane to your work.
But compounding these issues is a simple truth that has made science less impactful than it could otherwise be: Scientific papers are poorly written. And they’ve been getting worse.
Anyone who researches scientific style is bound to, sooner and later, cite Robert Boyle and Thomas Sprat. Right around the time of the Scientific Revolution and the establishment of the English Royal Society, in the 1660s, these two men defended opposing views on how to write science.
Boyle, now known as a founder of modern chemistry, argued in favor of making things interesting: A philosopher’s (or, as we would now say, a scientist’s) style ‘should delight its reader with his floridnesse’ and ‘disgust not its reader by its flatness’. A few years later, in a history of the Royal Society that is perhaps more accurately described as a manifesto, the clergyman and scientist Sprat disagreed, fighting fiercely against the use of tropes, metaphors, and ‘the volubility of tongue’.
It would be one thing if either vision had prevailed. But today, most scientific papers seem to reject both. Boyle would be appalled by the now ubiquitous terse, bland, supposedly objective language. Meanwhile, Sprat would certainly not agree that we have achieved his ideal of ‘primitive purity, and shortness, when men delivered so many things, almost in an equal number of words’.
Academic papers today are filled with jargon and abbreviations. Subject to the contradictory requirements of presenting impactful work and respecting arbitrary word limits, they cram a lot of information in very little space, leaving no room for interesting style or concrete examples. Unrelated ideas are strung together in wall-of-text paragraphs, providing no guidance to readers, who must then spend their cognitive resources figuring out the structure rather than absorbing the contents. Citations, though necessary, cause unending distraction with a profusion of parenthetical names and years in the middle of long, meandering sentences.
All of this adds to the inherent complexity of a paper’s topic. And so reading a paper in full becomes a chore – something that you do only if strictly necessary.
by Étienne Fortier-Dubois, Works in Progress | Read more:
Image: Plaven-Sigray, Matheson, Shiffler, Thompson (2017)
