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As a layman my impression is most papers are too verbose. At least the ones that I can understand. After reading tons of steganography papers (for example) I f

As a layman my impression is most papers are too verbose. At least the ones that I can understand. After reading tons of steganography papers (for example) I found they tend to begin with the same retelling of the history of steganography from the beginning of time up to now, even though it's completely irrelevant to the topic of the paper (which is not history).

kortilla 6y ago
That section is helpful for researchers both to contextualize the paper and to leave pointers to other papers the current one builds on. You’re right it’s not directly about the method in the current paper but it’s an important section nonetheless, even if it’s a bit meta.
serial_dev 6y ago
While that is true, it also helps people new to a scientific area. I can read 3-5 papers on a topic and the first chapters of each will give me enough to understand the gist of the topic, the status quo. It's a question of who you prioritize while writing a paper. Experts or the interested layman. If you prioritize people who are already experts in the topic, you write little to no introduction, you get to the results quickly. If you prioritize the "curious, interested layman" (or university students in their first years), a short introduction to a topic with references will provide enough information to understand the basics and the reader can continue reading the rest of the paper with enough context to understand why the topic is relevant.
- dalke 6y ago
  The way I write a paper for "curious, interested layman" is different than the way I write for experts. It's hard to keep both in mind when writing. Laymen, for example, might need some figures to help understand a topic that experts internalized years ago. I prefer having occasional well-written review papers, meant for getting non-experts up to speed. Then the domain experts - who are often not experts at writing for laymen - can refer people to those review papers, possibly also with a history delta for what's new since the review. "For a comprehensive review, see" https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22for+a+comprehensive+review+see%22 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22for+a+comprehensive+...
  - bumby 6y ago
    There's an added difficulty of writing to "tangential experts". I've had papers in the past that were 'tweeners, between two related but different fields. Depending on the audience, background information was needed that may be tedious for the other group.
    - pc86 6y ago
      Does content like this ever get published in two different journals, for different audiences, with different intro/lit reviews?
      - bumby 6y ago
        As far as I know, not really. Most journals require you to not submit to another journal until they've made a decision to reject so you can't submit to multiple. Even though they may have different intros, they’re presenting the same data.
- amelius 6y ago
  > While that is true, it also helps people new to a scientific area. That's what surveys are for.
dalke 6y ago
I also have the impression that CS papers all too often recapitulate the topic's history. I don't see the point. Other fields seem to leave it as "for a review of the topic see", cite someone(s) else, and get on with the paper. My field of cheminformatics, while CS-adjacent, inherits more strongly from the chemistry traditions. The occasional outsider papers from a CS department generally cause my eyes to glaze over if they follow that history-retelling CS tradition.
- Al-Khwarizmi 6y ago
  I personally find it useful. As a CS researcher, if I want to delve into a new topic (for example, because a specific line of work comes out where I think my research could be applicable) I typically can start by directly reading the paper I'm interested in, and in the introduction I'll find a brief history and some references I need to look at for context. It's much better than having to look through all the relevant papers in that topic in the last decades in order because they all assume knowledge of the past ones. Of course, I know there are survey papers, and they can be very useful, but they're typically going to be too general and not specifically oriented to what you need to understand that specific paper you're interested in. Plus, you inherit the biases of whomever compiled the survey, which in my experience are often significant.
  - R0b0t1 6y ago
    I've wondered for a while now how various funding and other constraints affect fields of science. In math, CS, or SWE it's easy to pick up a new topic, but in biology and chemistry people seem to have overwhelming tendency to work for decades at a time on singular problem areas. CS papers likely go over history because it tends to be more useful, with chemistry, all interested readers may have 5+ years in that field already.
  - dalke 6y ago
    I rarely read the CS literature so I can't says much about that. From reading cheminformatics papers by CS authors, I see that their history section is often only incompletely understood. For example, in paper I reviewed, the CS authors misread one a paper completely. They wrote something like "method X has been used in cheminformatics before [cite] but the CS literature has improved on that with method Y." But the paper they cited actually used method Y. Now, the paper itself didn't need that level of detail about the history. That error, and others like it, bugged me because they came across as dilettantes, writing with more assurance than they actually had, and because their history was biased towards the CS methods they knew, which made it feel like they snubbed the cheminformatics methods and treated the previous work in this field as second-class material. I can't help but think that the process you describe, where someone new to topic must write a history section just to publish, results in a lot of half-baked history, as new people just don't have the experience to really give a good treatment of the history. Instead, they'll see that 15 other papers covered points A-F so they follow the tradition that they need to cover points A-F but with a different slant. I'm not saying my field is immune to that! There's a well-known observation along the lines that "similar structures tend to have similar properties." Many people will cite a 1990 as the source of that quote. Except that that book doesn't contain that quote. Most people instead know about it second- or third-hand, which has resulted in the common but incorrect practice of making that citation. It's a litmus test I use to tell if the authors really know their history. Q: If you write multiple papers on a new topic, do you still write histories for each one? Or can you refer to your previous publications for the history?
ramraj07 6y ago
In biology the intro is typically not too long and generally gives just enough info so that even if a person was just browsing the journal they can get enough context about the field and topic and get a list of pre read references they can look back to if needed. The perfect introduction would ideally give you an introduction and a reading list that by itself would bring you up to speed to where the paper is starting from, without any need for second level reference digging!
- sarthakjshetty 6y ago
  I can attest to this fact. I've noticed often that papers in biology (systems biology in my experience at least) go directly to the point with some amount of context and history leading upto the main results of the paper. This is something that's suprisingly lacking in engineering, where reading a paper or grasping the context usually requires at least some amount of prior learning.
triceratops 6y ago
> most papers are too verbose...After reading tons of steganography papers Is it possible they were secretly reporting something else too?

kortilla 6y ago

That section is helpful for researchers both to contextualize the paper and to leave pointers to other papers the current one builds on. You’re right it’s not directly about the method in the current paper but it’s an important section nonetheless, even if it’s a bit meta.

serial_dev 6y ago

While that is true, it also helps people new to a scientific area. I can read 3-5 papers on a topic and the first chapters of each will give me enough to understand the gist of the topic, the status quo. It's a question of who you prioritize while writing a paper. Experts or the interested layman. If you prioritize people who are already experts in the topic, you write little to no introduction, you get to the results quickly. If you prioritize the "curious, interested layman" (or university students in their first years), a short introduction to a topic with references will provide enough information to understand the basics and the reader can continue reading the rest of the paper with enough context to understand why the topic is relevant.

dalke 6y ago
The way I write a paper for "curious, interested layman" is different than the way I write for experts. It's hard to keep both in mind when writing. Laymen, for example, might need some figures to help understand a topic that experts internalized years ago. I prefer having occasional well-written review papers, meant for getting non-experts up to speed. Then the domain experts - who are often not experts at writing for laymen - can refer people to those review papers, possibly also with a history delta for what's new since the review. "For a comprehensive review, see" https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22for+a+comprehensive+review+see%22 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22for+a+comprehensive+...
- bumby 6y ago
  There's an added difficulty of writing to "tangential experts". I've had papers in the past that were 'tweeners, between two related but different fields. Depending on the audience, background information was needed that may be tedious for the other group.
  - pc86 6y ago
    Does content like this ever get published in two different journals, for different audiences, with different intro/lit reviews?
    - bumby 6y ago
      As far as I know, not really. Most journals require you to not submit to another journal until they've made a decision to reject so you can't submit to multiple. Even though they may have different intros, they’re presenting the same data.
amelius 6y ago
> While that is true, it also helps people new to a scientific area. That's what surveys are for.

dalke 6y ago

I also have the impression that CS papers all too often recapitulate the topic's history. I don't see the point. Other fields seem to leave it as "for a review of the topic see", cite someone(s) else, and get on with the paper. My field of cheminformatics, while CS-adjacent, inherits more strongly from the chemistry traditions. The occasional outsider papers from a CS department generally cause my eyes to glaze over if they follow that history-retelling CS tradition.

Al-Khwarizmi 6y ago
I personally find it useful. As a CS researcher, if I want to delve into a new topic (for example, because a specific line of work comes out where I think my research could be applicable) I typically can start by directly reading the paper I'm interested in, and in the introduction I'll find a brief history and some references I need to look at for context. It's much better than having to look through all the relevant papers in that topic in the last decades in order because they all assume knowledge of the past ones. Of course, I know there are survey papers, and they can be very useful, but they're typically going to be too general and not specifically oriented to what you need to understand that specific paper you're interested in. Plus, you inherit the biases of whomever compiled the survey, which in my experience are often significant.
- R0b0t1 6y ago
  I've wondered for a while now how various funding and other constraints affect fields of science. In math, CS, or SWE it's easy to pick up a new topic, but in biology and chemistry people seem to have overwhelming tendency to work for decades at a time on singular problem areas. CS papers likely go over history because it tends to be more useful, with chemistry, all interested readers may have 5+ years in that field already.
- dalke 6y ago
  I rarely read the CS literature so I can't says much about that. From reading cheminformatics papers by CS authors, I see that their history section is often only incompletely understood. For example, in paper I reviewed, the CS authors misread one a paper completely. They wrote something like "method X has been used in cheminformatics before [cite] but the CS literature has improved on that with method Y." But the paper they cited actually used method Y. Now, the paper itself didn't need that level of detail about the history. That error, and others like it, bugged me because they came across as dilettantes, writing with more assurance than they actually had, and because their history was biased towards the CS methods they knew, which made it feel like they snubbed the cheminformatics methods and treated the previous work in this field as second-class material. I can't help but think that the process you describe, where someone new to topic must write a history section just to publish, results in a lot of half-baked history, as new people just don't have the experience to really give a good treatment of the history. Instead, they'll see that 15 other papers covered points A-F so they follow the tradition that they need to cover points A-F but with a different slant. I'm not saying my field is immune to that! There's a well-known observation along the lines that "similar structures tend to have similar properties." Many people will cite a 1990 as the source of that quote. Except that that book doesn't contain that quote. Most people instead know about it second- or third-hand, which has resulted in the common but incorrect practice of making that citation. It's a litmus test I use to tell if the authors really know their history. Q: If you write multiple papers on a new topic, do you still write histories for each one? Or can you refer to your previous publications for the history?

ramraj07 6y ago

In biology the intro is typically not too long and generally gives just enough info so that even if a person was just browsing the journal they can get enough context about the field and topic and get a list of pre read references they can look back to if needed. The perfect introduction would ideally give you an introduction and a reading list that by itself would bring you up to speed to where the paper is starting from, without any need for second level reference digging!

sarthakjshetty 6y ago
I can attest to this fact. I've noticed often that papers in biology (systems biology in my experience at least) go directly to the point with some amount of context and history leading upto the main results of the paper. This is something that's suprisingly lacking in engineering, where reading a paper or grasping the context usually requires at least some amount of prior learning.

triceratops 6y ago

> most papers are too verbose...After reading tons of steganography papers Is it possible they were secretly reporting something else too?