Comment by kragen
7 days ago
To be fair, current scientific papers are full of utterly terrible writing. If you read scientific papers from a century and a half ago, a century ago, half a century ago, and today, you'll see a continuous and disastrous decline in readability, and I think some of that is driven by pressure to strictly follow genre writing conventions. One of those conventions is using the passive voice even when the active voice would be better.
Are we talking about survivorship bias or are you comparing comparably important levels of papers?
It's hard to correct completely for survivorship bias, but it still holds very clearly for very prominent recent papers and for other papers that happen to be in the same journal issue as the old paper I went there looking for.