
Why so many research papers are so hard to understand - nathanmarz
http://nathanmarz.com/blog/research-papers-hard-understand/
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ggchappell
I really don't think it is necessary to bring in deliberate obfuscation as an
explanation. The fact is that writing clearly is _hard_. It takes work. And
tenure/promotion/etc. decisions are often made on output, not on clarity.

So, say I'm a researcher. I've written a paper. It's a mess. I can put some
more time into it, rewriting it to be more understandable, or I can use that
time to do research & writing for another paper. In the former case, I get one
clear paper; in the latter, I get two unclear ones. The people on my tenure
committee are going to read my publications list, but not the papers
themselves. Which scenario makes me look better to them?

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nathanmarz
My post is somewhat tongue-in-cheek :) The main point is that the incentive is
there to wrap uninteresting research in terminology and complexity - so if the
incentive is there, you wonder if anyone does it deliberately. I've read a lot
of papers which were difficult to grok but ended up being remarkably simple.

~~~
neilc
Another factor is that reviewers are sometimes inclined to reject papers that
are too straightforward: if the final result is so simple, is the work really
novel or interesting?

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soundsop
Another contributing factor is that most papers target an expert in the field,
so a lot of information is missing that is critical for people outside the
field. When you try to read a paper outside your field, the missing bits of
context and information make it really difficult to understand.

~~~
lmkg
Extending that, is the fact that clarity is relative to your audience.
Specialized jargon that is opaque to the layperson is also (ideally) far less
ambiguous than everyday language. If you're familiar enough with the jargon,
technical writing isn't just more concise, it's also an actual increase in
clarity due to the precision.

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oakenshield
I disagree. I am a late-stage PhD candidate in CS, and I cannot stress the
importance given to quality writing in academic circles. All of us know that
clear, concise writing plays a large part in getting your paper accepted, and
we're repeatedly told that if a reviewer did not understand something in a
paper, the fault should be assumed to be with the writing. Strunk & White's
"The Elements of Style" is a permanent fixture on most grad student desks.

My point is: if you're reading a reputable CS paper published at a top
conference, it is less likely to be hard to understand due to writing flaws
than due to the complexity of subject matter. Journals are a different beast,
but most good CS papers get published at conferences anyway.

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tybris
Not many people have mastered the skill of simple writing.

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pgbovine
the SCIgen example he cited at the end of that post is an extreme straw-man
... it was accepted into a fraudulent conference without receiving any peer
reviews. the more reputable the conference or journal, the harder it is to BS
the reviewers with obfuscation.

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crux_
I think it's important to recognize that the truly interesting and useful
research papers are hard to understand, too.

It's not supposed to be Harry Potter, and if you don't actually sit down and
work through the steps on page two, you have no right to complain that page
three is hard to understand. Feynman had a nice anecdote to this effect in
'Surely you're joking'...

Some of the most useful research papers I've come across have taken months for
me to actually understand.

~~~
eru
Yes, but Feynman only started with his approach after he got tired of trying
to explain to journalists in easy term what he did. (Or was it so?)

~~~
crux_
Nope. Here's the anecdote, cut'n'pasted since I can't direct-link to it:

> During the conference I was staying with my sister in Syracuse. I brought
> the paper home and said to her, "I can't understand these things that Lee
> and Yang are saying. It's all so complicated."

> "No," she' said, "what you mean is not that you can't understand it, but
> that you didn't invent it. You didn't figure it out your own way, from
> hearing the clue. What you should do is imagine you're a student again, and
> take this paper upstairs, read every line of it, and check the equations.
> Then you'll understand it very easily."

> I took her advice, and checked through the whole thing, and found it to be
> very obvious and simple. I had been afraid to read it, thinking it was too
> difficult.

~~~
eru
OK. I thought of another anecdote. The one where he gets his Nobel Price.

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duncanj
In Biology, most of the paper seems to be spent explaining why the new result
is relevant and how it differs from previous work. It's usually dry as a bone
but I wouldn't call it obfuscated. Readers should probably have Wikipedia
handy for defining terms.

Long papers tend to have a heck of a lot of research. A short paper could be
about a single experiment, but often a writer will publish a larger body of
work in one paper. Value added, I suppose.

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sofal
I agree with this. I've read so many 10-15 page papers that could have been
explained more succinctly and clearly in an average length colloquial blog
post. Researchers come up with some dumb unoriginal idea and dress it up so it
looks complicated and new. Getting your paper accepted is not always about
quality.

