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Comment by syphilis2 | Hacker News Reader

Why don't the authors do these 11 steps for us?

Because they are not writing for non-scientists.

I understood that the steps are followed by scientists such as the author, it's just the guide that is intended for non-scientists.

Not necessarily. IMO, she proposes a specific way of "thinking" about the paper's content (I use another approach [1]). Papers are written following a certain structure because many people think it's a better way of presenting the ideas in detail/with the necessary rigor (that's what other "scientists" in the field would expect). For example, no researcher expects a five-sentence summary of the background. Personally, I expect an explanation of the relevant concepts/techniques and some sort of analysis of how existing work relates to the paper (instead of a list of related papers). At least in software engineering, many papers state the research questions explicitly, i.e., they would be identified if you read the paper from beginning to end. They tend to have a "results" section as well, so summarizing the results myself would be an intellectual exercise. Once you understand how papers are usually structured, you pick up on many of those things as you go (I mean, as you simply read the paper as the author intended).

On a side note, I'd say that many researchers don't do a good job of conveying their ideas clearly (it gets worse with conference presentations). It won't really matter in what order you try to read their papers.

[1] http://blizzard.cs.uwaterloo.ca/keshav/home/Papers/data/07/p...

all scientist were non-scientists first though, correct?

Look, I get that there's some natural professional context and lingo that goes into these things, but for all the angst that goes into what esteem that population at large holds up the science community

making their work more accessible to both novices and interested outsiders would be a nice step in the right direction

I agree with you. To put it simply, papers are optimized for the scientific community and making them "more accessible" to outsiders has a cost. I'd settle for better writing and presentations within the scientific community for now. If you ever find researchers that blog about their research in simple terms, I think it's safe to assume they're using their personal time to do that (I know of very few; Andy Ko [1] comes to mind).

[1] https://medium.com/bits-and-behavior

I think that they often do when it's appropriate, but the way they make them more accessible isn't by changing their papers but by giving talks or presentations that are less technical (like TED talks for example).

This seems like a good approach in my humble opinion.

Because their goal is to get published so that they can move along in their careers. Their target audience doesn't require these 11 steps.

My question would be why don't donors and taxpayers (who are funding research) demand that researchers do these 11 steps?

Because donors and taxpayers still wouldn't understand the summary version in many, many cases.

> My question would be why don't donors and taxpayers (who are funding research) demand that researchers do these 11 steps?

Because the overwhelming majority of taxpayers do not read them or care to. Also, even though a taxpayer may not read papers, they hopefully still see the value in the progression of science, and allowing scientists to assume a certain level of background to the audience of their paper probably allows them to use their time on science.

Perhaps there's an opportunity for a motivated individual or group of individuals to make something to parse papers and help make it easier to read for those who don't have the proper background?

Because most journal articles are speaking to multiple audiences—those wanting to efficiently consume the text in a literature review (like the instruction in this article) and others who are preparing a rebuttal or an elaboration on the methods; still others are trying to understand the larger discourse / set of questions in which the paper is embedded, and don't particularly care about the specific results of any one. Journal articles as they are currently written are a decent compromise among the needs for all of these populations.

In addition to reasons stated: some journals (or academic disciplines) expressly reject clarifying content within papers. Listing of variables used in equations is one specific example that's been mentioned to me by Joerg Fliege, an academic himself, at G+.

(His "Academia, Schmacademia" collection is very highly recommended.)

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