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The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete. Here’s what’s next.

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xa na xa

A.E.I.O.U. - Antarticae est imperare orbi universo
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Article:
The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete

Here's what's next.


The scientific paper—the actual form of it—was one of the enabling inventions of modernity. Before it was developed in the 1600s, results were communicated privately in letters, ephemerally in lectures, or all at once in books. There was no public forum for incremental advances. By making room for reports of single experiments or minor technical advances, journals made the chaos of science accretive. Scientists from that point forward became like the social insects: They made their progress steadily, as a buzzing mass.

The earliest papers were in some ways more readable than papers are today. They were less specialized, more direct, shorter, and far less formal. Calculus had only just been invented. Entire data sets could fit in a table on a single page. What little "computation" contributed to the results was done by hand and could be verified in the same way.

The more sophisticated science becomes, the harder it is to communicate results. 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.

[...]

Victor gestured at what might be possible when he redesigned a journal article by Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz, "Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks." He chose it both because it's one of the most highly cited papers in all of science and because it's a model of clear exposition. (Strogatz is best known for writing the beloved "Elements of Math" column for The New York Times.)


[...]

Victor's redesign interleaved the explanatory text with little interactive diagrams that illustrated each step. In his version, you could see the algorithm at work on an example. You could even control it yourself.

[...]


Check out the example link. What are your opinions on the future evolution of the scientific paper?
 
xa na xa said:
Article:
The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete

Here's what's next.


The scientific paper—the actual form of it—was one of the enabling inventions of modernity. Before it was developed in the 1600s, results were communicated privately in letters, ephemerally in lectures, or all at once in books. There was no public forum for incremental advances. By making room for reports of single experiments or minor technical advances, journals made the chaos of science accretive. Scientists from that point forward became like the social insects: They made their progress steadily, as a buzzing mass.

The earliest papers were in some ways more readable than papers are today. They were less specialized, more direct, shorter, and far less formal. Calculus had only just been invented. Entire data sets could fit in a table on a single page. What little "computation" contributed to the results was done by hand and could be verified in the same way.

The more sophisticated science becomes, the harder it is to communicate results. 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.

[...]

Victor gestured at what might be possible when he redesigned a journal article by Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz, "Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks." He chose it both because it's one of the most highly cited papers in all of science and because it's a model of clear exposition. (Strogatz is best known for writing the beloved "Elements of Math" column for The New York Times.)


[...]

Victor's redesign interleaved the explanatory text with little interactive diagrams that illustrated each step. In his version, you could see the algorithm at work on an example. You could even control it yourself.

[...]


Check out the example link. What are your opinions on the future evolution of the scientific paper?
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It's a useful addition for teaching results, but not a replacement in entirety.
 
Shard said:
The point of science is to learn, though? And a lot of learning occurs through teaching.
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Yes, but you also need to know the background behind the information when pushing science forward. Usually, scientific papers are acting as a stepping-off point, instructing the reader in not only the successes but the failures as well so that mistakes are not repeated. They also give a good idea as to the how and why of doing something. While this new concept works for the HOW of doing something, it seems to neglect the WHY, which is why scientific papers will continue.
 
I think whoever wrote that article forgot what a paper is meant for. The paper acts as a abstract of a larger report, Its intended audience is peers and equals/persons keeping up with the subject matter, and its compression is mandatory. Papers already use excellent diagrams to clarify their complexity, meaning that the interactivity of computer diagrams is nice but hardly a selling point for a paper. Apart from that, the paper as is is meant to be recorded on paper due to the finality of it. It should be accessible outside a computer environment. The format this person seems to want to achieve is more akin to a presentation, with interactive or otherwise crossmedia formats. This is a OK thing, but it is in a entire class of it's own, with different target audiences and different goals.
 
Gears said:
I think whoever wrote that article forgot what a paper is meant for. The paper acts as a abstract of a larger report, Its intended audience is peers and equals/persons keeping up with the subject matter, and its compression is mandatory. Papers already use excellent diagrams to clarify their complexity, meaning that the interactivity of computer diagrams is nice but hardly a selling point for a paper. Apart from that, the paper as is is meant to be recorded on paper due to the finality of it. It should be accessible outside a computer environment. The format this person seems to want to achieve is more akin to a presentation, with interactive or otherwise crossmedia formats. This is a OK thing, but it is in a entire class of it's own, with different target audiences and different goals.
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OTOH papers without a link to, say, github repo with code used and just relying on code snippets all over the paper without any hint about environment or other setup are exceptionally obnoxious.
 
ctulhuslp said:
OTOH papers without a link to, say, github repo with code used and just relying on code snippets all over the paper without any hint about environment or other setup are exceptionally obnoxious.
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If it's a actual paper it likely has some analogy or reference to further documentation. Though as i mainly get to see engineering papers i don't know how code is handled exactly in papers.
 
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