
Science papers are getting harder to read (2017) - mpweiher
https://www.nature.com/news/it-s-not-just-you-science-papers-are-getting-harder-to-read-1.21751
======
throwaway77749
A fun thing I've noticed among HN and HN-adjacent crowds (e.g. the rationalist
movement) is - and I'm sorry to be disparaging here - this fetishizing of some
of the worst and most boring aspects of science: opaque, always serious and
long-winded writing, an obsession with citations and links ("do you have
evidence to back this up?"), mindless statistics even if they don't make
sense, trudging through bibliography and literature, and so on. I get that the
intentions are noble (of course assertions need to be backed up, of course
statistics are essential, and so on) but the end result is that arguing on HN
feels like passive-aggressively LARPing as scientists, but not with any of the
good stuff.

Actual discussions between scientists are much more lively: either both
participants know the literature so no one bothers with citations and we try
to directly jump to the key insights using our and other people's intuitions;
one side knows the relevant literature and one does not (happens often in
collaborations) and blindly trusts the former; both sides don't now anything
(happens often in bars and conference cocktails) and just speculate wildly
without any seriousness or defensiveness.

The writing part (with all the seriousness, opaqueness and citation overload)
is utterly boring and mindless drudgery: I know very few people who actually
take pleasure reading or writing papers, and the few ones that do are
considered weird.

~~~
solveit
> Actual discussions between scientists are much more lively

This only works because the _people_ are vetted. Almost everyone on HN is a
rando and randos had better be able to back their assertions up. Otherwise you
just end up spending all your time humouring crazy people.

~~~
throwaway77749
But a scientific article is not an exercise in argumentation. The main purpose
of citations is to guide readers who are new to the field, give credit to
readers who are experienced in the field (indeed, many criticisms of an
introduction or discussion from reviewers amount to "wtf you didn't cite that
paper I wrote"), or contrast with previous results. It's not "here's why I'm
right" but "here's how existing stuff relates to what I've found". The tone is
much less assertive. Scientists are not a very assertive bunch in general.

------
unicornmama
That title is so provincial. Rewrite as “We found an increase in the slope of
comprehension impediments in publications within the field of systematic study
of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through
observation and experiment.”

~~~
vonmoltke
This crap is creeping into the tech world as well:
[https://twitter.com/mrtz/status/1181646802790969344](https://twitter.com/mrtz/status/1181646802790969344)

------
pintxo
> So how could the readability of scientific papers be improved? First, by
> recognizing that good writing doesn’t happen by magic. It can be taught —
> but rarely is. Douglas suspects that many first drafts of papers are written
> by junior members of a research team who, lacking any model for what good
> writing looks like, take their lead from what is already in the journals.
> And there “they see the jargon and complexity as markers of what passes as
> scientific writing”, she adds. Such self-reinforcing mimicry could certainly
> account for the trends highlighted by Thompson and his colleagues.

This is pretty much my experience with scientific writing. No one told me how
to do it, so I started copying the style from the papers and books I had at
hand.

~~~
jackallis
can you please list out book/youtube videos, anything ,through which good
scientific writing can be learned/improved?

i will be working with ton of phds this year and starting one fall 2020.

~~~
arandr0x
Ask your PhDs if they have a journal club, they'll translate the jargon to you
and you'll develop decent pattern matching.

Read the conclusion before the "Results" section. In fact, read the "results"
section last.

Read review papers, they are _way_ less bad. In addition they tend to comment
on the source papers clearly enough that you can use them as a reading guide.
Same goes for theses, but only if they're any good, so review papers work
better. Pick a good review journal (impact factor is a decent proxy).

Email the author of a paper if you have a specific question (on the methods,
what a result means, why they chose to put some data in supplementary and some
in the paper, etc). Usually it works and they don't actually write emails in
academese. Always write to the corresponding author not necessarily the PI.

If you want to write papers and not merely read them, reading them is the
first step so do the above first, and then loosely parrot what you've seen in
the wild with some technical term mad libs thrown in.

------
jefft255
I find it funny that Nature is writing this as their journal require such
short papers (usually three pages) that you basically can’t explain anything
in real depth. Every AI paper that ends up in Nature, I have to go read
something else to get it (usually a paper by the same author elsewhere).

~~~
xamuel
I find your comment really interesting because I see things the opposite: the
shorter the paper the better, in my view. This is grounded on the general
principle that in 99% of cases, any particular paper will only have one really
important key new insight (if even that much). I suppose I'm biased because I
primarily read theory papers, maybe it's a different story when it comes to
experimental stuff.

~~~
jefft255
Exactly; I come from robotics which is highly experimental and it is very easy
to design a robotics experiment where there will be no way to fit a
description of the experiments plus the theory in three pages.

------
hinkley
Ten, fifteen years ago I told a coworker I’d been an ACM member for a while
and that I enjoyed reading the SIGPLAN proceedings in particular.

He stopped, stared, and asked, “you can read those?” I was taken aback but
realized I knew exactly what he meant. I told him, “about half” and this
somehow relieved him a bit.

We need a lot more abstract thought in plain English in this world.

The problem with smart people is that they have the faculties to create
elaborate protections against easily bruised egos. If only we could figure out
those faculties can also be used to get over yourself and try to be helpful to
the world instead of a trumped-up windbag.

------
martindbp
I find it a better strategy to first read blog posts explaining a paper more
casually in order to get the intuition for the thing, before reading the
actual paper. I think this is closer to how the researchers were talking about
it while doing the actual research, rather than the formal description used in
the final paper.

~~~
chadcmulligan
I find this for a lot of maths - I have often wondered why they don't include
the intuition and the process that led them to the result.

~~~
JadeNB
> I find this for a lot of maths - I have often wondered why they don't
> include the intuition and the process that led them to the result.

On the most basic levels, because journals don't want it and many referees
want it taken out. (There's still the mindset that physical space on paper is
a bottleneck, since most of the big journals also have printed versions.)

On a less cynical level, intuition is highly non-transferrable. What gives me
the intuitive understanding of my result probably won't help you
([https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-
intuiti...](https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuition-
and-the-monad-tutorial-fallacy)). I think that the established school of
thought is therefore that, rather than my giving you my useless esoteric
intuition, better to give you the results of crystallising that intuition into
a transferrable formalism, and then allow you to decode that formalism into
your own custom-built intuition.

~~~
chongli
_On a less cynical level, intuition is highly non-transferrable._

This is a fantastic insight. I have been so frustrated trying to reach people
monads over the years. People complain that Haskell is only intelligible for
those with a math background. Now I understand why!

It’s not because Haskell requires you to know the underlying abstract algebra
and category theory to grok monoids (in the category of endofunctors). It
doesn’t! It’s because people who have studied math in undergrad have developed
the skills to take a bare, abstract definition and work through a few examples
on their own to build an intuition for the concept. Regular people for the
most part do not do this! Most people are used to having everything explained
to them and not used to learning anything really abstract which requires
effort to understand. This is where their frustration comes in, just as it
does for first year math majors at a rigorous school.

------
Merrill
Grammatical and structural complexity is a problem that should be corrected.
However, the use of specialist terms and abbreviations is not a problem so
long as they are understood by the audience for the paper. The example given
is OK if understood by interested biochemists.

------
rdlecler1
There is selection for obfuscation. Sound smart and technical and the
reviewers will give it a pass because they are too embarrassed not to call out
what they don’t understand. Make it easy to read and it’s easy to see the
problems.

------
thelazydogsback
On a related note, can someone tell me why scientific/technical papers do not
have the publication date listed prominently in the title area? -- usually
this info is _nowhere_ to do found in the paper. When I find a PDF of a paper
I want to look at the date along with the abstract as a first-pass heuristic
as the whether the paper is relevant to me.

------
zarro
You would expect that as the topic of conversation becomes more esoteric, that
they would get harder for the general audience to understand.

But what I think sometimes happens is even the target audience doesn't
understand what the papers are saying.

Goethe said something about this in his autobiography about health/chemistry
books that were popular in his day where imposters would write some
"Scientific" book which is full of esoteric terminology that would look
appealing to the lay reader, but once you started analyzing and reading that
work "the book still remained dark and unintelligible; except that at last one
become at home in a certain terminology, and, by using it according to one's
own fancy, felt that one was at any rate saying, if not understanding,
something".

------
hatmatrix
Didn't English only become the lingua franca of science since WWII? Before
then, French and German was more the norm. So the increasing number of non-
native English speakers contributing to this pool of literature analyzed could
have something to do with it.

Technical English is much more restricted in its vocabulary (within each
field) and conforms to predictable patterns that are markedly different from
colloquial English, which was used as a reference for readability. It is this
technical English that foreign language scientists pick up and publish in, so
perhaps the conclusions are not surprising.

------
dawg-
I don't really see the problem here, to be honest.

Thoreau wrote that real reading is that which we have to "stand on our
tiptoes", and "devote our most wakeful hours" to grasp. The French philosopher
Gilles Deleuze believed that we aren't really thinking if we don't struggle
with the content. He maybe took it to an overly extreme level in his writing,
but I like his general point.

The article cites the increased presence of words such as 'robust’,
‘significant’, ‘furthermore’ and ‘underlying’ as examples of how papers are
getting harder to read.

They go on to say,

>The words aren’t inherently opaque, but their accumulation _adds to the
mental effort_ involved in reading the text.

The article doesn't sufficiently explain why mental effort is something to be
avoided. Or why multisyllabic words are actually bad. Perhaps if one read
_more_ texts with lots of multisyllabic words it would get easier over time?

They give a scary example sentence from an abstract (completely taken out of
context anyhow):

>Here we show that in mice DND1 binds a UU(A/U) trinucleotide motif
predominantly in the 3' untranslated regions of mRNA, and destabilizes target
mRNAs through direct recruitment of the CCR4-NOT deadenylase complex.

Well a good reader knows that when you don't know a word, you look it up. If i
was reading this paper I would have to look up just about everything in that
sentence:

What is DND1? What is a "UU(A/U) trinucleotide motif?? What is "the 3'
untranslated regions of mRNA", what is translation of mRNA for that matter?
What does mRNA even do? What is a target mRNA and what does it mean for one to
be destabilized? What is the CCR4-NOT deadenylase complex?

Would it take me hours to read this paper and gain an incomplete, novice-level
understanding of it? Yes. But just in that one sentence I would learn like
1000% more about biology than I currently know.

You do not need researchers to waste time writing a basic biology textbook in
every single one of their papers. You need them to communicate their research
and get to the point. If the reader wants to understand it they need to put in
the work, science will never be easy and devoid of mental effort.

I realize this will not be a popular post as many people value accessibility
in science and more widespread science literacy. But I argue that
accessibility is not the same thing as easy reading, and a literacy built on
purposefully watered down texts is a cheap knockoff of true understanding won
through dedicated effort.

~~~
arandr0x
> But just in that one sentence I would learn like 1000% more about biology
> than I currently know.

I mean, no you wouldn't. DND1 is a protein name and googling it won't tell you
exactly what it does, because it may be involved in several pathways. There is
probably a gene dnd1 (note the lowercase) that will muddle up your search
results . Destabilizing mRNAs can happen a bunch of ways and knowing the
others won't help you with that one, also the vast majority of biologists
don't care about mRNA being destabilized one way or the other. Biology is a
ton of _details_ , and by learning too much too early about the details you
miss the big picture. Just sign up for a class if you're at this level.

> You need them to communicate their research and get to the point.

Arguably the problem with the sentence you quoted is it gets _too much_ to the
point. It is very precise and obviously of use to anyone is interested in mRNA
decay. It does not tell you what most HN readers want to know, which is why
they should care about mRNA decay.

(And if they want to know that, they should read review articles.)

There is a problem with opaque biology papers, but in my experience, the main
problem in those cases are the data (impossible to find) and the figures
(tables filled with bad statistics and low-res western blot pics). I
understand all the jargon in the sentence you quoted, but none of the
implications; and I understand that this means I haven't learned anything by
reading it at all (though I do have a grad degree in biology).

------
tomkat0789
For generally improving writing, I'm a big fan of "The Art of Scientific
Storytelling" by Rafael Luna. It's a short, focused book that walks you
through writing an easy (well... easier) to read scientific manuscript.

------
imvetri
Don't laugh at this suggestion. Gif / visual representation of the paper
should also be published.

~~~
_Wintermute
If you haven't you should check out
[https://distill.pub/](https://distill.pub/) it's mainly machine learning
focussed but I really like the idea.

