Comment by immmmmm
6 days ago
When I was doing my phd, around 2 decades ago, I was often going to the library’s compactus to fish for a Phys Rev from the 80s. Back then papers were sparse and expensive. But the quality!
The Higgs boson is 3 papers, 6 authors and 6 pages in total!
At the end of my phd, 30++ pages slop papers were the norm.
Nowadays, well..
The paper by Higgs was one page. The guy probably published less than a hundred pages in his career.
One reason that made me abandon a career was the disgust caused by the publishing frienzy.
And now tokens..
There is an obscure topic where I have read basically every single dissertation, study, etc on that topic (or even just articles that mention it). It is very noticeable how much briefer older publications were.
It would be impossible to do that today. I guess I could have an LLM just summarise all the papers…
What's the reason for this? Publish-or-perish? Papers have to be more thorough? Extra junk tacked on for the sake of showing lengthier papers?
CS conference papers often have page limits (e.g. ACL ARR is 8 pages double-column), so most paper main bodies are exactly that, as it's seen as sloppy if you don't use the full count. I've had someone point out that it's best to use the entire page 8 without leaving any gaps.
There are also appendices, which reviewers aren't required to read. If there's something relevant that doesn't fit in the main body and you don't put it in the appendix, reviewers will point it out and ask for it, and it will influence their grades.
In the end, publishing papers these days is about convincing reviewers rather than actually writing a good paper. And you usually have reviewers asking for all sorts of things.