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This is actually a major gripe of mine when reading papers - not enough effort to communicate the math so it's readable. It's really frustrating to decipher a p
by therobot24 12y ago
This is actually a major gripe of mine when reading papers - not enough effort to communicate the math so it's readable. It's really frustrating to decipher a paper when there's a lot of hand waving. It's 10x worse when buzzwords or unimportant relationships are also included.
- RBerenguel 12y agoIf you've gone through paper-publishing, editors ask for pretty large reductions. A 29 page paper can easily be a 50-60 pages paper with "decent details" or a 150 pages paper with clear explanations of all details.
- raverbashing 12y agoSure, publish the reduced paper in the journal, then have the "Scenic Guide" in your webpage or ArXiv, or wherever Or, I dunno, just create a subreddit or a StackOverflow page for it
- arjunnarayan 12y agoThe best, most readable version is often the author's dissertation, although this obviously only applies for the works of graduate students.
- RBerenguel 12y agoThis assumes infinite time to add all minutiae to LaTeX. Not everyone works directly on that, almost everyone thinks on paper, develops ideas on paper and then TeXifies it. In my case, most of the "it is clear that" never made it into any version of the final file.
- raverbashing 12y agoWell, you certainly don't need all the minutiae, but some hand holding, especially on specific papers that deal with some theorems that might not be so well know would be helpful.
- sdenton4 12y agoMy favorite journal - the electronic journal of combinatorics - doesn't have page limits because it never gets printed. You can also use as many colors as you like in your diagrams! Meanwhile, a friend of mine uses a bool in their LaTeX files for 'idiot mode'; flip it on and recompile to get the painfully detailed versions of all the proofs. Since the source is on the arxiv, it means each paper has a kind of half-hidden long version.
- lacker 12y agoAnother reason that paper journals are no longer the ideal medium for scientific research.
- Fomite 12y agoBeyond the paper constraints, there's often something of a selective pressure to obfuscate as a way to get through review. Math you don't quite understand seems complex. Math that's clear and concise seems, after the fact, to be trivial.
- playhard 12y agoI have been seeing this too. Steve Pinker in his books, Sense of Style, has portions which talk about this problem. He calls it -"Curse of Knowledge" and has advise for scientific writers. I wish researchers could spend a bit more time on improving their writing skills for better communication.
- tjl 12y agoI've been working on a paper from my PhD thesis. I have 10 pages of derivations before I even get to the solution of the equations, include figures, or perform analysis. It could easily be a 30 to 40 page paper. Cutting it down or splitting it into 2 papers will likely be necessary because of page limits. You kind of need to pick and choose what to leave out. Of course, it happens without page limits as well. I used work from an older book and between two steps was easily two pages of work and there's another half dozen pages of work that from other parts of the derivation.