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I am less delighted, than some in the comments. I mean, most of the advice is genuinely good general writing advice, so general in fact, that it borders on advi
by krick 2y ago
I am less delighted, than some in the comments. I mean, most of the advice is genuinely good general writing advice, so general in fact, that it borders on advices like "be good". Typography advices are good. But if we keep in mind that this is not really a recommendation, but pretty much an obligatory guide to follow for the intended audience, the more specific writing advice doesn't amuse me. Why cannot I start a sentence with a symbol, and must insert filler-words, why do ∀ and ∃ only belong to formal logic? The author of the guide may prefer it like that, but why enforce it?
But that's not why I wanted to comment. The whole document makes me think, that the whole generic structure of how one writes papers, should it still be done like that? Does enforcing it do more good than harm? Can it be changed?
I do not belong to academia, so where I'm coming from is having to read this stuff when researching anything. And the general sentiment I want to express here is that I really don't like to have to read these things. To be fair, it is less applicable to math papers, than other topics, but academic papers are not easy to get information from, the main thing they are supposedly exist for. You can sometimes find a blogpost which essentially contains the same information, but is much shorter, clearer and niced than the accompanied paper. And it just comes down to format. I mean, it probably does play on paper reasonably well, when you have it printed out and intend to read it fully, repeatedly, using a highliner. But it is not how most of the people read them most of the time, right? Most of the people read it on a screen, first when trying to understand how is it related to what they are researching now, then as a reference. And pretty much everything about these papers is awful for that.
First off, abstracts. Absolutely essential thing in theory, woefully misused most of the time. I don't want an abstract, I want a TL;DR. I don't want to read empty words about what it "explores" and such, I want to read as full and as condensed final result, as possible. If there is a concrete finding, I want it as the first sentence.
References. I don't want neither [BV04] nor blah-blah Somebody et al [BV04]. I want clickable links to resources whenever possible. They don't have to be academic papers, it can be anything that helps me to learn more about the topic in the shortest amount of time.
Code. Code is close to useless on paper, I want it to be on GitHub, with a clickable link. All excerpts that you have in your paper, I want them to be highlighted, because that's how it's supposed to be read, there is a reason why everybody but 90 years old professors use highlighting.
Instead of ugly hard to read plots in these papers there are dozens of JS libraries to make interactive plots that can help you show anything you want to show.
Even the mere fact I have to read a PDF off my screen, which I cannot resize to my liking, is annoying. Why must it be paper-first in 2024, when everything is screen-first? Surely there can be rules in these guidelines to make these documents easy to print as well, given how much time one is supposed to spend on correct typographics in LaTeX.
- Ar-Curunir 2y agoYou are not the audience for an academic research paper. The audience is other researchers who understand the norms of the field, and are used to the notation and idiosyncrasies. Re: code. I don’t think any research paper in any field of CS includes source code verbatim in the paper, it’s usually snippets like you want. Sometimes source code is not linked from the paper, but that’s a different issue, and common in industry too (eg closed source code). Re: references, it’s not about explaining a topic (though that happens sometimes), it’s about providing a pointer to a resource that a researcher who already knows the research landscape can go look at and confirm that yes, the claimed fact is indeed in a previously vetted resource. That is, it’s more about provenance than explanation. Re: optimizing for PDF output as opposed to optimizing for, say, HTML output/web reading, I only have this to say: I can easily read papers produced 30 years ago in PDF form. I cannot say the same for some websites even 5 years old.
- JadeNB 2y ago> To be fair, it is less applicable to math papers, than other topics, but academic papers are not easy to get information from, the main thing they are supposedly exist for. You say that this is less applicable to math than other topics, which is funny—as a mathematician, I'd think that it's more applicable! In the strictest sense of the word, the purpose of a math paper is not to allow others to get information from it, though of course a good math paper will do that. The purpose is to show definitively (in the very strong mathematician's sense of the word, stronger even than the physical scientist's sense) that something is true. Especially for the first proof of an ‘obvious’ fact like, say, the four-color theorem, filling in all the necessary rigor can be at odds with clarity. That is, it is exactly when one is tempted to skip over some point with an appeal to the reader's intuition that one must most carefully fill in those details. (Lots of wrong proofs of the four-color theorem came from explicit or implicit appeals to mistaken intuition.)