The Elements of Scientific Style
3rd June 2023
How many scientific papers have you read in full over the past year? Presumably, none or very few, unless you belong to a small number of specific professionals, like researchers or science communicators. Even if you do read papers as part of your job, you probably haven’t read many of them beyond the title and abstract, especially if they lie outside your field of expertise.
There are several reasons for this, including the difficulty of accessing papers that lie behind the paywalls of large publishing companies and the extreme specialization of most academic articles, which limits their appeal. Also, scientific topics are often complex, and it’s generally not worth spending time and energy to understand a technical argument unless it’s particularly germane to your work.
But compounding these issues is a simple truth that has made science less impactful than it could otherwise be: Scientific papers are poorly written. And they’ve been getting worse.