11–20 of 62 posts
The “table of contents in a paragraph “ is almost compulsory in any engineering (even applied maths) paper, in most journals… As far as I can tell.
Hence many papers contain exaggerated claims with respect to practicality, importance and so on.
Another sin is that the results need to be "difficult" and "surprising" in order to publish. Hence, if you present your story in a simple-to-understand fashion, you run a high risk of rejection. Better not simplify your results before publishing -- keep all original notation, even if you figured out you do not need that many indices.
This has become a dogma and there is little chance of all this nonsense stopping anytime soon.
It is refreshing to read old papers that merely get to the point and are significant while being nice to read.
Regarding "grandmothering": I agree with the criticism of the first example. Explaining basic points of the field in a vague way is obviously not helpful. The second example is not as compelling. The key point is that the "..." after "In recent years, the study of preconditioners for iterative methods for solving large linear systems of equations, arising from discretizations of stationary boundary value problems of mathematical physics, has become a major focus of numerical analysts and engineers" usually contains a string of citations. These citations serve to point the reader to the recent works mentioned in the sentence, which may not be readily accessible to someone who doesn't actively do research in that area but is otherwise knowledgeable about numerical computing.
In particular, the author reasons such introductions are bad because "the bulk of the paper is accessible only to those sufficiently expert in the field to know everything in the first two paragraphs of the introduction cold." But this is just wrong. There are plenty of math/physics papers where I can follow the arguments line-by-line, but I don't know the state of the art in the field or why the problem under consideration might be important. I don't think I am alone.
Regarding, "A table of contents in a paragraph": I think the author is partially correct. For short papers, it's perfectly fine to fold this part into the introduction (e.g. in the outline of the proof). But for longer works where the proof is decomposed into multiple lemmas and sub-lemmas, these can be very useful. If one writes the proof in a very clear and structured way, then maybe such "shotgun summaries" can be avoided. But this is not always possible.
Regarding conclusions that only repeat the introduction: I agree here.
At first I thought the author was purposefully eschewing any useful formatting to make a point later about how this work itself would be easier to read if a minimal amount of formatting was provided to make it more palatable to those reading it, but no, upon checking other pages of theirs, and even loading up developer tools in case some CSS file was failing to load (and finding none), it seems this author is blind t…
>Really Bad Acronyms, or FBAs, are spawned by FNPLs (Nerdy Project Leaders) when naming new systems Nothing like personal attacks to get your point across. Well done author.
I disagree with a lot of this. My perspective comes from reading papers in mathematics and physics, not computing, however. Regarding "grandmothering": I agree with the criticism of the first example. Explaining basic points of the field in a vague way is obviously not helpful. The second example is not as compelling. The key point is that the "..." after "In recent years, the study of preconditioners for iterative m…
Wouldn't they be better off as an actual table of contents though, rather than in paragraph form?
At first I thought the author was purposefully eschewing any useful formatting to make a point later about how this work itself would be easier to read if a minimal amount of formatting was provided to make it more palatable to those reading it, but no, upon checking other pages of theirs, and even loading up developer tools in case some CSS file was failing to load (and finding none), it seems this author is blind t…
The webpage was written in 1997.
I agree these are annoying patterns, but I honestly don’t notice them. I don’t read research papers like a book, front to back. Often I skip the abstract, skim the intro, skip to the conclusion to skim what they say I’ll find, and then read the core. The table of contents paragraph I skip without thinking about it. I’m more bothered by people who use bizarre notation, don’t provide sufficient definitions/background,…
I think you've hit the nail on the head. The articles "sins" don't matter because experts skip over these parts. And this is the reason they are not a focus of the authors.
I still think the article points out things that can be improved but the benefit is taking a good paper and making it more palatable to people who are not experts or on-the-way to being experts, thus expanding the population of people who might cite the paper.
The “table of contents in a paragraph “ is almost compulsory in any engineering (even applied maths) paper, in most journals… As far as I can tell.