1. Journals have length limits. And readers don't read long papers at all.
2. Many academics have not worked hard enough to attain excellent writing skills - they were too busy becoming excellent at their discipline.
The most important reason.
- Given a clear lucid explanation of new knowledge that no one but you know, is incredibly difficult. Honestly, anyone, who thinks it's easy should take a stab at undertaking a research project and then trying to summarize months or years of work into 6-10 pages.
Papers are designed to be read by a specific audience of highly technical, skilled people in a topic where if it is original research, must be very explicit, and prove and disprove multiple things simultaneously.
Of course, standards vary significantly institution to institution and even person to person, and highly technical, skilled people are not indicative of full capability of reading, let alone reviewing the topic, doubly so when it is original research.
Let me translate this for the layman: papers are written using terms and notation that only makes sense if you've gone through the the process of learning their derivation from first principles in the narrow field in which they apply.
It has the odd effect of making this stuff comprehensible only to those that essentially already know what it is, and possibly a few people academically adjacent to those people.
Other people can decipher it, after long and arduous labor, but it essentially requires rediscovering the path that brought it about, knowing what the outcome will be. In that sense these papers are less useful than they seem.
Academia is a little like religion: to outsiders the language and rituals make little sense, only those indoctrinated in its tenets can achieve enlightenment.
This is a very poor and inaccurate "translation". Papers from math and physics are hard to understand not because of specific choice of "terms and notation" but because of actual concepts they are based on. Terms and notation actually make it easier to understand, compressing pages of words into a single symbol. Without these the best you get is quanta article, where you can get a vague feeling of what is being done, but no actual understanding.
If you talk about a modern city with a hunter gatherer, how many words would you have to explain? Do these words exist because modern life is "like a religion" and hunter gatherer is not "indoctrinated"?
I think this completely misses the point. A paper presents one new idea and builds on top of many existing ideas and generally assumes that the reader is familiar with all the existing ideas. And that is completely reasonable, the purpose of a paper is to concisely present the new idea, not to be a textbook that teaches you the entire field from the ground up.
That said, conveying an idea in an easily understandable way is hard and some authors will do better or worse than others. Also papers will usually not purely present the new idea but provide some context so that the reader only needs to be familiar with the topic up to the context but the amount of context given will vary a lot between papers.
They shouldn’t. It makes papers less accessible which means they’re less impactful. That said, a lot of academics are good at their discipline and bad at writing.
A big problem is prior knowledge. Most papers incrementally increase knowledge so by necessity they have to assume the reader knows it, lest they find themselves repeating it alot. How far back are you expected to go to help your audience understand?
The answer in most of academia is: not at all. You're expected to have learnt everything in the field up to that point. Academia is for academics and generally doesn't care about impact outside of academia, who seldom understand it anyway (because of its academic nature).
Every field has jargon and assumed knowledge. If you're writing a computer science paper, you're not going to start by teaching the reader grade school math.
Not necessarily. I agree, being a smart scientist doesn’t make one a good writer , however, most of the times the inaccessibility of a text comes from a high presumed knowledge of the reader. But if you dial the presumption down, then the readers versed in the field would have to drag through the text full of explanations they already know. And, excuse my assumption, most relevant citations come from the people in the field.
I think the chances of a human being existing who knows enough about a specific topic that they can write a paper about it, and who is also an exceptionally clear writer, is pretty low.
So if you want the knowledge, you go in knowing this. If you don't want the knowledge that much, wait until it becomes a popular topic and people make books or blogs about it.
Important topics that are read by many people get rewritten into textbooks that are very easy to read compared to the original papers, but people complain a ton about those textbooks as well so there is no way to placate people like you here, no matter how hard they try people demand them to try harder.
The trite reasons:
1. Journals have length limits. And readers don't read long papers at all.
2. Many academics have not worked hard enough to attain excellent writing skills - they were too busy becoming excellent at their discipline.
The most important reason.
- Given a clear lucid explanation of new knowledge that no one but you know, is incredibly difficult. Honestly, anyone, who thinks it's easy should take a stab at undertaking a research project and then trying to summarize months or years of work into 6-10 pages.
Papers are designed to be read by a specific audience of highly technical, skilled people in a topic where if it is original research, must be very explicit, and prove and disprove multiple things simultaneously.
Of course, standards vary significantly institution to institution and even person to person, and highly technical, skilled people are not indicative of full capability of reading, let alone reviewing the topic, doubly so when it is original research.
Let me translate this for the layman: papers are written using terms and notation that only makes sense if you've gone through the the process of learning their derivation from first principles in the narrow field in which they apply.
It has the odd effect of making this stuff comprehensible only to those that essentially already know what it is, and possibly a few people academically adjacent to those people.
Other people can decipher it, after long and arduous labor, but it essentially requires rediscovering the path that brought it about, knowing what the outcome will be. In that sense these papers are less useful than they seem.
Academia is a little like religion: to outsiders the language and rituals make little sense, only those indoctrinated in its tenets can achieve enlightenment.
This is a very poor and inaccurate "translation". Papers from math and physics are hard to understand not because of specific choice of "terms and notation" but because of actual concepts they are based on. Terms and notation actually make it easier to understand, compressing pages of words into a single symbol. Without these the best you get is quanta article, where you can get a vague feeling of what is being done, but no actual understanding.
If you talk about a modern city with a hunter gatherer, how many words would you have to explain? Do these words exist because modern life is "like a religion" and hunter gatherer is not "indoctrinated"?
I think this completely misses the point. A paper presents one new idea and builds on top of many existing ideas and generally assumes that the reader is familiar with all the existing ideas. And that is completely reasonable, the purpose of a paper is to concisely present the new idea, not to be a textbook that teaches you the entire field from the ground up.
That said, conveying an idea in an easily understandable way is hard and some authors will do better or worse than others. Also papers will usually not purely present the new idea but provide some context so that the reader only needs to be familiar with the topic up to the context but the amount of context given will vary a lot between papers.
1 reply →
I guess it's more about the reader's lack of knowledge.
They shouldn’t. It makes papers less accessible which means they’re less impactful. That said, a lot of academics are good at their discipline and bad at writing.
A big problem is prior knowledge. Most papers incrementally increase knowledge so by necessity they have to assume the reader knows it, lest they find themselves repeating it alot. How far back are you expected to go to help your audience understand?
The answer in most of academia is: not at all. You're expected to have learnt everything in the field up to that point. Academia is for academics and generally doesn't care about impact outside of academia, who seldom understand it anyway (because of its academic nature).
Every field has jargon and assumed knowledge. If you're writing a computer science paper, you're not going to start by teaching the reader grade school math.
Not necessarily. I agree, being a smart scientist doesn’t make one a good writer , however, most of the times the inaccessibility of a text comes from a high presumed knowledge of the reader. But if you dial the presumption down, then the readers versed in the field would have to drag through the text full of explanations they already know. And, excuse my assumption, most relevant citations come from the people in the field.
I think the chances of a human being existing who knows enough about a specific topic that they can write a paper about it, and who is also an exceptionally clear writer, is pretty low.
So if you want the knowledge, you go in knowing this. If you don't want the knowledge that much, wait until it becomes a popular topic and people make books or blogs about it.
Because you can't avoid that in many cases.
Important topics that are read by many people get rewritten into textbooks that are very easy to read compared to the original papers, but people complain a ton about those textbooks as well so there is no way to placate people like you here, no matter how hard they try people demand them to try harder.
same reason we have to wear a suit to a funeral. culture.