> Of course papers are expected to be "bulletproof." It's called a standard of excellence.
And sometimes it's just having to add verbiage in anticipation of a lazy or uninformed reviewer, who is not necessarily the audience that you actually care about. The net result is that there is a lot of work and fluff that interested readers often have to put up with that exists solely to get the paper through review and serves little other purpose.
> The rest of the post aside, this particular bit of the "rant" just feels like a defense of lazy writing. An academic paper isn't just a blog post, and it shouldn't be.
If your point here is that blog posts are "lazy writing", then I assure you I have read many blog posts that are much more thorough, well-researched, and worked-over than academic papers. I do agree with you that the two are separate things, but blog posts have a number of desirable qualities that academic papers have difficulty optimizing for–either because they are not prioritized, or because they would actively hurt the chances of acceptance.
> who is not necessarily the audience that you actually care about
But see, that hits the nail on the head.
There's a reason papers are full of long intros, backrounds, and even mini-literature surveys.
Because the audience isn't just other tenured professors in the same subfield. It's the rest of the field, it's grad students, it's undergrads, it's researchers in other fields it might be valuable for.
It's also for people trying to figure out even which subfield the author is approaching it from, to contextualize the paper -- is this political science paper being written by a structuralist or a culturalist, even when they never explicitly say so, but it makes all the difference for judging it?
It's easy but short-sighted to assume you're writing solely for your peers. Thankfully, the "verbiage" and "fluff" you disdain is deeply appreciated by many, many other readers.
To reiterate: there are very good reasons for these standards. What's fluff to you, is extremely valuable to many others.
I’m not actually really in academia, so when I say these papers have fluff I mean they actually have fluff, not content useful to professors or students or casual readers or whatever. These are things added specifically to get through review and only make the paper worse.
I guess we read different papers. The ones I read are mainly in psychology, sociology, political science, and political philosophy. And in having read well over 1,000 papers (just by counting in Zotero), I can't ever recall reading part of a paper and thinking "this is fluff" or "this must have been added specifically to get through review".
Not once.
Maybe it's a problem in other fields, or in very specific journals? I honestly don't even know what fluff looks like, which is why I'm so confused by this whole thread.
It sounds like repeating "state-of-the-art", "novel", never before seen, revolutionary new research that will change the entire world, you wouldn't believe how my method beats other baseline methods by huge margins, and you wouldn't believe how this paper will revolutionize the entire field, etc, etc, multiple times in the paper so the bored reviewers don't reject your paper. I'm exaggerating but it's close to the truth. You kind of have to turn your paper in an advertisement of your work to get past the reviewers.
But again, your paper ought to be an advertisement, no? That makes it clear why it matters? That's why there's an abstract, an intro, a conclusion.
I have read a lot of writing where I wonder, "yes but what's the point? why does this matter? what's the actual impact here?" So to have that clearly stated is incredibly helpful for all readers -- not just what it does but how much it matters, why and for whom.
Writing for a public audience isn't a place for false modesty -- it confuses rather than helps.
You have a good point but I think it’s a matter of degrees than a yes/no situation.
There are also other things a researcher is incentivized to do to get past reviewers such as emphasizing only the good points of your algorithm, deemphasizing its downsides, comparing only against current so-so algorithms or baseline algorithms or algorithms a couple of years old instead of the latest state of the art so that your algorithm can look good. As in, even if you propose an algorithm that has new ideas in it that could bear fruit in the future with more refinements, you as a researcher would only hype it up to get past the reviewers.
And sometimes it's just having to add verbiage in anticipation of a lazy or uninformed reviewer, who is not necessarily the audience that you actually care about. The net result is that there is a lot of work and fluff that interested readers often have to put up with that exists solely to get the paper through review and serves little other purpose.
> The rest of the post aside, this particular bit of the "rant" just feels like a defense of lazy writing. An academic paper isn't just a blog post, and it shouldn't be.
If your point here is that blog posts are "lazy writing", then I assure you I have read many blog posts that are much more thorough, well-researched, and worked-over than academic papers. I do agree with you that the two are separate things, but blog posts have a number of desirable qualities that academic papers have difficulty optimizing for–either because they are not prioritized, or because they would actively hurt the chances of acceptance.