{"id":2847,"date":"2008-08-20T11:40:00","date_gmt":"2008-08-20T11:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/08\/20\/in-defense-of-short-papers\/"},"modified":"2008-08-20T11:40:00","modified_gmt":"2008-08-20T11:40:00","slug":"in-defense-of-short-papers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/08\/20\/in-defense-of-short-papers\/","title":{"rendered":"In Defense of Short Papers"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Mad Biologist points to and agrees with<\/a> a post by Jonathan Eisen with the dramatic title “Why I Am Ashamed to Have a Paper in Science<\/a>. Eisen’s gripe is mostly about Science<\/cite> not being Open Access, but he throws in a complaint about length restrictions, which is what the Mad Biologist latches on to and amplifies. Eisen writes:<\/p>\n

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Science with its page length obsession forced Irene to turn her enormous body of work on this genome into a single page paper with most of the detail cut out. I do not think a one page paper does justice to the interesting biology or to her work. A four page paper could have both educated people about the ecosystems in the deep sea, about intracellular symbionts in general, and about this symbiosis in particular. The deep sea is wildly interesting, and also at some risk from human activities. This paper could have been used to do more than just promote someone’s resume (which really is the only reason to publish a one page page in Science).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Mike amplifies this, saying “The format of a Science<\/cite> article might be good for Science<\/cite>, but it’s not so good for science.”<\/p>\n

I don’t really care about the Open Access stuff, one way or another (I think it’s largely missing the point, but don’t think it hurts anything), but I do want to disagree with both Mike and Eisen about the format. Contrary to what they say, I think there are real benefits to journals publishing shorter papers highlighting exceptional results, both for reader and for authors.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Most of my publishing has been in journals with strict page limits– Physical Review Letters<\/cite> and Science<\/cite>, so I know what a hassle it is to distill a complicated set of data down into four journal pages. At the same time, though, having to meet those limits forced me to become a better writer, in line with Michael Nielsen’s rules for re-writing<\/a> (an excellent post, from which I will excerpt only the bullet-point rules. Go read the whole thing.):<\/p>\n

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Every sentence should grab the reader and propel them forward<\/p>\n

Every paragraph should contain a striking idea, originally expressed<\/p>\n

The most significant ideas should be distilled into the most potent sentences possible<\/p>\n

Use the strongest appropriate verb<\/p>\n

Beware of nominalization<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Left to their own devices, academics and scientists are prone to producing really dreadful prose– convoluted passive-voice sentences chock full of nominalizations and needless qualifications. I do the same thing myself, in my first drafts. Writing to fit a tight page limit forces you to break out of those habits, for the simple reason that “We conducted a study of X” has more characters than “We studied X.”<\/p>\n

Short papers can become really dense, but they’re almost always better written than long papers.<\/p>\n

I also think there are advantages from the reader’s side: it’s worth having some journals out there that only publish the hottest new results, and having those papers be short. It’s very helpful for those of us who try to follow fields somewhat outside our own narrow areas to have a source of compact updates on the best new results in a variety of subfields.<\/p>\n

The sheer number of papers in, say, Physical Review A<\/cite> is a real impediment to reading that journal, and the unrestricted length of those papers means that many of them are a real chore to read. I only look at PRA papers when I really need to track down some detail.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, I get weekly email updates from Physical Review Letters<\/cite>, which has a four-page limit, and I do look at those. The length restriction means that the writing can be a little dense, but it also means that I can easily find what I’m looking for in the paper. They get to the point quickly, and the results are all right there.<\/p>\n

(I don’t regularly look at Science<\/cite> or Nature<\/cite>, because they don’t publish enough physics to be worth my time. Any really good physics from those usually turns up in an update from Physics World<\/cite> or some other news service. When I do look, though, the same holds true– it’s easy to find what I’m looking for, thanks to the compact format.)<\/p>\n

Do these articles contain every last bit of useful data? No, but they’re not supposed to be entirely self-contained. Details on how some measurement were made are sometimes sketchy, but they’re usually explained in more detail elsewhere, with references provided: “Using the method of Ref [8], we…” or “The apparatus is described in more detail in Ref. [17]…” and so forth.<\/p>\n

This is as it should be. People who are already experts in the field already know the tricks, and don’t need them spelled out again. People who are reading outside their own field don’t necessarily want the gory details, they just need the cool results. I’m very happy to believe, for example, that Toichiro Kinoshita’s group know what they’re doing when they sum the 893 Feynman diagrams needed to find the anomalous g-factor for the electron, and I’m happy to have that glossed over in favor of getting to the latest result for the measurement. If I need the details, I can find the Phys. Rev. whatever paper that contains all the nitty-gritty calculational stuff.<\/p>\n

I have complained in the past about the length restrictions, but the only real complaint I have with the concept is that it can be difficult to get people outside the field to understand that a four-page PRL represents just as much work as a 30-page PRA, if not more. As a general rule, I’m happy to have these journals, and I’m happy that they have page limits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Mad Biologist points to and agrees with a post by Jonathan Eisen with the dramatic title “Why I Am Ashamed to Have a Paper in Science. Eisen’s gripe is mostly about Science not being Open Access, but he throws in a complaint about length restrictions, which is what the Mad Biologist latches on to… Continue reading In Defense of Short Papers<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2847\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}