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It would also heavily detract from actually writing the paper. It's easy in hindsight to think about certain steps it took to get where you end up, but if you a

It would also heavily detract from actually writing the paper. It's easy in hindsight to think about certain steps it took to get where you end up, but if you are at the start, there are simply too many intentional and unintentional steps to record everything. I much rather have people focus on the actual science than documenting their steps ever few minutes.

ordu 8y ago
An article is a hindsight reflections on what was done. If you are doing research you need to make notes. I personally can't remember what I've read and where I got an idea. I need to write things down, to be able to refer to it later. I'm logging my thoughts on regular basis, just to be sure they are verbalized and formalized. The goal is not to document every step in a formal manner, the goal is to leave a trail that can be tracked by a curious researcher to see how article was formed. Current situation is bad, because articles do not capture all the information that needed to validate the research findings. p<0.05 is not enough for this. Including more information into the article is one of the ways to deal with that problem. But the other is to leave footprints, to create some historical data, that could be analized. Or not analized if no one needed it. It is like lazy-evaluation: just generate some data to allow your followers to reason about what precisely you've done. If they needed it, they will research your trail. You do not need to go through a difficult task of writing a high-quality texts about every your step. The only thing you need to change is to make such notes public. It is coupled with some potential ethical issues, like privacy of subjects for example. If I run experiment, I gathered some data, I couldn't just throw this data into public access. It is possible that there are other ethical issues, maybe something about privacy of researcher as a person. These issues can make logging research activities a pain.

ordu 8y ago

An article is a hindsight reflections on what was done. If you are doing research you need to make notes. I personally can't remember what I've read and where I got an idea. I need to write things down, to be able to refer to it later. I'm logging my thoughts on regular basis, just to be sure they are verbalized and formalized. The goal is not to document every step in a formal manner, the goal is to leave a trail that can be tracked by a curious researcher to see how article was formed. Current situation is bad, because articles do not capture all the information that needed to validate the research findings. p<0.05 is not enough for this. Including more information into the article is one of the ways to deal with that problem. But the other is to leave footprints, to create some historical data, that could be analized. Or not analized if no one needed it. It is like lazy-evaluation: just generate some data to allow your followers to reason about what precisely you've done. If they needed it, they will research your trail. You do not need to go through a difficult task of writing a high-quality texts about every your step. The only thing you need to change is to make such notes public. It is coupled with some potential ethical issues, like privacy of subjects for example. If I run experiment, I gathered some data, I couldn't just throw this data into public access. It is possible that there are other ethical issues, maybe something about privacy of researcher as a person. These issues can make logging research activities a pain.