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> 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 suppose

by 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.)

krick 2y ago
I don't see where we disagree. That's pretty much exactly why my points are less relevant for math papers: they are supposed to be self-contained. And while the result is sometimes interesting and can be put into TL;DR, I'd say in the most cases the entire point is reading the proof. No, I mean there definitely were cases when I was just wanted to see the final formula and skip the derivation, and I'd absolutely want it to be in the abstract as often, as possible, and I suspect that many math papers could be improved by using a better media than a LaTeX pdf file, but, as you said yourself, for math, it mostly isn't about informing me about the result. It is for most other fields. Basically, in the majority of cases the entire paper should be reducible to a couple of sentences that are useful on their own, which I'd like to read in (or rather instead of) the abstract, and the rest 50 pages of the paper should be a detailed report of why is it reasonable to believe you didn't lie (intentionally or not) to me in the abstract, by explaining the exact way to reproduce it, with providing as much data as legally possible. But the insufficiency of the content in your typical research paper is another topic, and much more complicated, so I wasn't going to start about that again, I only raised the points about the format, since that's what the thread is about.
- JadeNB 2y ago
  > I don't see where we disagree. That's pretty much exactly why my points are less relevant for math papers: they are supposed to be self-contained. I'd certainly disagree that math papers are supposed to be self-contained (at least they are not supposed to be completely self-contained, or else they'd balloon to ridiculous size), but I think I misunderstood your comment: > 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. I read it as "it is less applicable to math papers than other academic papers that they are not easy to get information from." I think, based on your follow-up, that you meant instead "it is less applicable to math papers than other academic papers that they exist for getting information from." My apologies for misunderstanding.

by JadeNB 2y ago

krick 2y ago

I don't see where we disagree. That's pretty much exactly why my points are less relevant for math papers: they are supposed to be self-contained. And while the result is sometimes interesting and can be put into TL;DR, I'd say in the most cases the entire point is reading the proof. No, I mean there definitely were cases when I was just wanted to see the final formula and skip the derivation, and I'd absolutely want it to be in the abstract as often, as possible, and I suspect that many math papers could be improved by using a better media than a LaTeX pdf file, but, as you said yourself, for math, it mostly isn't about informing me about the result. It is for most other fields. Basically, in the majority of cases the entire paper should be reducible to a couple of sentences that are useful on their own, which I'd like to read in (or rather instead of) the abstract, and the rest 50 pages of the paper should be a detailed report of why is it reasonable to believe you didn't lie (intentionally or not) to me in the abstract, by explaining the exact way to reproduce it, with providing as much data as legally possible. But the insufficiency of the content in your typical research paper is another topic, and much more complicated, so I wasn't going to start about that again, I only raised the points about the format, since that's what the thread is about.

JadeNB 2y ago
> I don't see where we disagree. That's pretty much exactly why my points are less relevant for math papers: they are supposed to be self-contained. I'd certainly disagree that math papers are supposed to be self-contained (at least they are not supposed to be completely self-contained, or else they'd balloon to ridiculous size), but I think I misunderstood your comment: > 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. I read it as "it is less applicable to math papers than other academic papers that they are not easy to get information from." I think, based on your follow-up, that you meant instead "it is less applicable to math papers than other academic papers that they exist for getting information from." My apologies for misunderstanding.