nekomata comments on Why Academic Papers Are A Terrible Discussion Forum - Less Wrong

25 Post author: alyssavance 20 June 2012 06:15PM

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Comment author: nekomata 22 June 2012 08:58:23AM 4 points [-]

In my experience, the process of research does not correspond to what you're describing. First, you find something interesting which could be made into a paper. The first thing you do at this point is speaking about it to other researchers, more or less formally (face-to-face discussion, email, formal presentation). Only after having got some feedback, you begin to write a draft. Then, you publish this draft on your personal website at the same time you send it to a journal for review. You get feedback both from the official reviewers and readers of your site.

So it adresses point 10 : the bottom line is presented first on the paper, but it was not written first (hopefully, at least). It is presented first to readers, but you can always choose to skip it. I mainly use abstracts to actually understand what the paper is about, because titles are not always clear.

It also adresses point 1 : sure, the time lag for publishing a paper is huge, but people have an access to it very early, and as Lukeprog said, it shows that you are at least willing to submit your ideas to review.

And finally, for point 2, more and more people publish a version of their papers on their websites, at least before publication. More generally, journals have come under heavy attacks, and the current model of expensive journals may not last long.

That said, I also think that there are problems with the way papers are published (points 4, 5 and 11 seem most problematic).