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The Scientific Paper is Obsolete (2018)

theatlantic.com

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Re: The Scientific Paper is Obsolete (2018)

#2

Post by PhilipVinc »

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’ve actually discovered, clearly enough that someone else can discover it for themselves.

Re: The Scientific Paper is Obsolete (2018)

#3

Post by rtkaratekid »

PhilipVinc wrote: post #2

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…

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 mean the raw data.

Re: The Scientific Paper is Obsolete (2018)

#8

Post by netizen-936824 »

rtkaratekid wrote: post #3
PhilipVinc wrote: post #2

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…

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,…

Raw data can be on the order of terabytes, not that it can't be shared but this is a real barrier when it comes to raw data

Re: The Scientific Paper is Obsolete (2018)

#9

Post by d110af5ccf »

queuebert wrote: post #4

As a practicing scientist, I firmly believe the world would be much better off if we simply published version-controlled Jupyter notebooks on a free site, such as GitHub or ArXiv.

> As a practicing scientist

> version-controlled Jupyter notebooks

That's awfully field specific. It probably wouldn't work for most of STEM. Even for ML I shudder to imagine trying to make sense of the inevitable monstrosities. Writing a paper is part of the thinking process. It forces the author to sit down and work through things in an orderly manner and they're still often difficult to read.

I'm definitely in favor of all papers being accompanied by working source code when relevant though.

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