4 ms·

Why do you say that scientific writing was better in the '90s? I'm just curious, not challenging your claim.

• twic 13y ago
  Back when i used to read a lot of papers, i found that i enjoyed the ones from the 90s more. I think the further you go back in time, the more honest and open scientists were in their writing; as time has gone on and academia has become more crowded and competitive, the more papers read like marketing. Authors writing in the 80s would happily admit that there were things they didn't know or hadn't proven; to do that now would be a sign of weakness. I remember a paper from the 80s, the first one reporting the localisation of some cytoskeletal protein, vinculin or talin or something, where the authors present a set of microscope images showing that the protein is found exclusively at the ends of stress fibres (the main structural members of many kinds of cell). Great finding! And then they show a picture of a cell where it isn't, and is instead assembled into lots of little rings. The caption says that they have no idea what kind of cell it is, or why it's doing that. I just can't imagine that happening today. In this case, this is a review paper, so that doesn't directly apply. But i think the ethos still pervades the writing; the authors are writing to explain what's known, not to advance some hypothesis or demonstrate how much they know.