[HN Gopher] The Scientific Paper is Obsolete (2018) ___________________________________________________________________ The Scientific Paper is Obsolete (2018) Author : PhilipVinc Score : 23 points Date : 2021-12-13 21:42 UTC (1 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com) | otrahuevada wrote: | I myself enjoy reading papers. | | At least after I transfer them to a single column, 14/16pt tall | font with real headers, that is. | | The graphic format itself is dated and annoying, yes, but I find | the expositional tone and immediately searchable references | pretty cool. | PhilipVinc wrote: | 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. | rtkaratekid wrote: | I think this almost every time I read the paper. It's like | Linus' "show me the code." I just want papers now to "show me | the data and the code." And include a discussion about why | these results are important. I think it's a great time for the | scientific community to improve transparency on these fronts. | | Sincerely, someone who reads a lot of research but contributes | none because I'm an amateur. | | Edit: when I say data, I mean the raw data. | netizen-936824 wrote: | Raw data can be on the order of terabytes, not that it can't | be shared but this is a real barrier when it comes to raw | data | d110af5ccf wrote: | I agree that they should ideally come with raw data along | with all code that was used to process it to produce the | results as presented. | | > but contributes none because I'm an amateur | | I don't mean to be rude but it seems relevant to point out. | Papers aren't written for the benefit of amateurs. They're | written for experts who actively work in that specific field. | I don't think there's anything wrong with that. | queuebert wrote: | As a practicing scientist, I firmly believe the world would be | much better off if we simply published version-controlled Jupyter | notebooks on a free site, such as GitHub or ArXiv. | d110af5ccf wrote: | > As a practicing scientist | | > version-controlled Jupyter notebooks | | That's awfully field specific. It probably wouldn't work for | most of STEM. Even for ML I shudder to imagine trying to make | sense of the inevitable monstrosities. Writing a paper is part | of the thinking process. It forces the author to sit down and | work through things in an orderly manner and they're _still_ | often difficult to read. | | I'm definitely in favor of all papers being accompanied by | working source code when relevant though. | robotresearcher wrote: | Do you do so? If not, why not? | queuebert wrote: | I do share code that way, but the traditional ivory tower | standards by which I am judged require "refereed journal | publications" in high impact factor traditional journals. I'm | trying to fight back against that, largely unsuccessfully. | | What would help me is to have the old geezers consider GitHub | issues, PRs, and commits as a type of citation and to have a | better way of tracking when my code gets used by others that | is more detailed than forks. | | I also think citations of your work that find errors or | correct things should count as a negative citation. Because | otherwise you are incentivized to publish something early and | wrong. Thus the references at the end of the paper should be | split into two sections: stuff that was right and stuff that | was wrong. | [deleted] | dr_dshiv wrote: | http://distill.pub/about/ | | It's been done and it is amazing. This is the best journal in the | world imho | antognini wrote: | It is also on hiatus :( | | https://distill.pub/2021/distill-hiatus/ ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-12-13 23:00 UTC)