You 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 a

You 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.