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You're all assuming it's about making papers pretty or fit a template, but the major time sink is length limits. The abstract has to have a specific number of
by pornel 3y ago
You're all assuming it's about making papers pretty or fit a template, but the major time sink is length limits.
The abstract has to have a specific number of chars or words (which varies by journal), and it's a critical part of the paper, so you never want to waste a single word. There's also limit for the total number of pages or words, which again needs text rewrites. Sometimes format of references is weird, and needs conversion macros or manual edits.
Reviewers always want more information, more references, more tables, so publishing is an endless puzzle to fit all of that within limit that is always too short to fit everything you have to say.
Having concise paper is of course great, but submitting to multiple places requires editing multiple variations, and that is busywork.
- gww 3y agoThe length limits also forces authors to increase the complexity of their figures to cram as much data into the limited space as possible. I've seen papers with figures that have 10+ graphs all squished into a half page figure. EDIT: This usually limits proper explanations of the data in the text too because of very limited word counts.
- patrick451 3y agoYup. And then half the paper is fluff, citing similar work (and all the room those citations take up), trying to make an argument what they did is novel. It's interesting to note the difference between papers 30 (this might vary by field) years ago compared to now. The old papers are mostly substance, and spend very little space on the introduction and political "positioning". Partly this makes sense since things were younger and work tended to be more novel by default back then. But I also think it's a sign of a sort of petty dysfunction. Academics get graded on their "impact", and citations is part of that. So reviewers want you to cite their results, and your reviewers are likely to be folks with similar papers. So authors go citation crazy, trying to appease selfish reviewers, leaving themselves with less than three pages to describe what they actually did.
- boredemployee 3y agoAnd we are living in times where productivity, tight deadlines are more and more common, inevitably people will use generative AI to fulfill idiotic and antiquated bureaucracies.
- qumpis 3y agoSurely there's a benefit for the authors of doing so? Compressing information forces one to keep only the most important bits, presumably
- patrick451 3y agoNot in my experience. The information is only so compressible. You're usually better of if the authors have an uncompressed preprint on their website. Those tend to be much clearer.
- jrumbut 3y agoThere is absolutely a benefit. What is painful is when one venue has a length limit of 6 pages and the next has a limit of 5 pages (plus one page for references), but when you port the paper from one Latex template to the other it explodes to 8 pages because of formatting. In all cases, what they want and what you have is "a short paper" but you're going to have to take several hours out of your life and probably make some meaningful changes to the content. What would be best is if publishers could come together and harmonize their requirements to the extent possible.
- PeterisP 3y agoSure, abstracts are a good thing and we do want such compressed information about the article - however, recompressing a 'compressed' abstract from 300 words to 200 words or from 200 words to 300 words (which is usually mandatory if resubmitting elsewhere) is time consuming, lossy, and doesn't add value.