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Similar things can be said about the textbook and the lecture
If you haven't yet, maybe look at Andy Matuschak's "Why books donʼt work" [1] and " How can we develop transformative tools for thought?" [2] which connect these same ideas to education in general.
[1] https://andymatuschak.org/books/ [2] https://numinous.productions/ttft/
None the less I wonder if the goal should be to make it so any person could understand a complex paper? Should all people strain to understand every study? There are experts in certain fields for that very reason. It is not always possible to accurately explain higher level concepts to people who lack foundational knowledge that can take years to accrue. I am not certain if changing papers to be more interactive is going to bridge the gap as this author hopes, or if it is even the goal that should be pursued.
Posted annually since original and plenty of discussion then:
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this almost every time I read the paper. It’s like Linus’ “show me the code.” I just want papers now to “show me the data and the code.” And include a discussion about why these results are important. I think it’s a great time for the scientific community to improve transparency on these fronts. Sincerely, someone who reads a lot of research but contributes none because I’m an amateur. Edit: when I say data,…
I agree that they should ideally come with raw data along with all code that was used to process it to produce the results as presented. > but contributes none because I’m an amateur I don't mean to be rude but it seems relevant to point out. Papers aren't written for the benefit of amateurs. They're written for experts who actively work in that specific field. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
Papers today are longer than ever and full of jargon and symbols. They depend on chains of computer programs that generate data, and clean up data, and plot data, and run statistical models on data. These programs tend to be both so sloppily written and so central to the results that it’s contributed to a replication crisis, or put another way, a failure of the paper to perform its most basic task: to report what you…
One of the first suggestions I have is to use source control and store the Git hash of code used to generate data. A few times I've heard back "we don't have time for that" - pretty easy to see how the replication crisis flows from processes like that.
While I agree with the premise of this article - that the scientific paper is obsolete - the proposed alternative does not address the primary inefficiencies with our current system. Dynamic 'papers' with illustrative examples are surely an improvement over current manuscripts. However, a flashy paper should be well down the list of goals for a research program. At the top of the list should be to make an important d…
if you can magically predict result of research project, this will work!
"I would encourage the equal reporting of both positive and null findings. Performance would not in any way be based on positive findings, only that the experiments were carefully run."
Would you have considered the LHC experiments "failures" had we not found evidence of the Higgs Boson? I certainly wouldn't have. What matters most is that important questions backed by sound theoretical reasoning are addressed carefully, collaboratively, openly, and with plenty of long-term support. If we do that, we get genuine answers - such answers represent important information whether or not they support our original hypotheses.
I read the abstract, in reverse order. Discussion and Results first.
If it seems plausible ( much research is trash, churned out to pad a CV ) and interesting, then I scan the Methods section.
This heuristic helps classify 95% as utter trash or outside my current area of interest in less than 10 seconds.
If it seems seriously interesting, I then read the full text the same way ie: backwards.
At no point do I want pretty visualisations made by wannbe PhD candidates, full of misinterpretations, wishful thinking or outright fraud.
I think this is a great idea theoretically, but in reality for most papers I don't want to see the data/underlying code. While it would be great to publish data/code with the paper (in the field I've worked on the most, astronomy, most data is already published with the paper anyways), I don't want/need to look through a notebook with the underlying code of the paper in order to just read the intro/conclusions (and m…
I have made an experiment with my last paper: Write everything from scatch in Jupyter Notebook, including data preprocessing and generation of all figures (etc.) (10 Notebooks in total). Start of the conceptualization was in 2017, we just submitted it 2 weeks ago (it got desk rejected for not fitting the journals topic). I learned a lot and it was definitly worth it. The next paper will be easier with this knowledge.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's really disappointing that technical societies like the ACM and IEEE haven't done this already. For many journals and conferences there isn't even a way to submit the code or other digital artifacts with the PDF. A few have badging for whether digital artifacts are provided and whether the results have been reproduced or repeated by others - steps in the right direction at least. As much as I intensely dislike th…
> ...For many journals and conferences there isn't even a way to submit the code or other digital artifacts with the PDF. Why not to stuff it into a repo and reference it in the text? Of course, a central location within a stable institution helps with continuity of availability of such repo. But at least this gives you some control over it.
As an academically employed scientist of 20 years, the notion that scientific communication suddenly needs better standards puzzles me. The core research curriculum of nearly every scientific field I’ve seen, STEM or otherwise, is that the data needed for replication are non-negotiable. A paper that doesn’t include it would be table rejected by any editor. Or one would hope. This is taught at the UNDERgraduate level,…