[porcoda]

I agree these are annoying patterns, but I honestly don’t notice them. I don’t read research papers like a book, front to back. Often I skip the abstract, skim the intro, skip to the conclusion to skim what they say I’ll find, and then read the core. The table of contents paragraph I skip without thinking about it.

I’m more bothered by people who use bizarre notation, don’t provide sufficient definitions/background, and don’t give enough information to reproduce the results myself (and I’m not talking about a git repo). I could care less if they have useless sentences and repetition if the content and methodology is complete and understandable.

[k0stas]

> I agree these are annoying patterns, but I honestly don’t notice them. I don’t read research papers like a book, front to back.

I think you've hit the nail on the head. The articles "sins" don't matter because experts skip over these parts. And this is the reason they are not a focus of the authors.

I still think the article points out things that can be improved but the benefit is taking a good paper and making it more palatable to people who are not experts or on-the-way to being experts, thus expanding the population of people who might cite the paper.

[ModernMech]

> The articles "sins" don't matter because experts skip over these parts.

Yes and no. Yes in the sense that if you are an expert trying to stay current in your field, you will skip around a lot in most papers.

But no in the sense that when you find a paper that is especially relevant to what you are doing, you will read and scrutinize every single word, symbol, and figure in that paper until it’s completely mined of all relevant information.

I think one reason the intro isn’t always a huge focus is because it’s literally written last in many cases. There are typically page limits, or a cost per page. What you’ve got to say about your research could fill hundreds of pages, so you already have to cut that down. Once you’ve said what you need to about the actual work it’s probably already past the submission deadline, and you don’t want to spend forever writing an intro that will just end up costing you more pages. It’s basically going to fit into whatever space is left to round the paper to the next full page.

[foobarian]

> I agree these are annoying patterns, but I honestly don’t notice them.

Right, these things have become a bit ritualized. To continue flogging the religious analogy a paper is like the Mass, you do your readings first, then you chant a bit, then you tell your audience an uplifting story, etc. You notice only when a step is skipped, otherwise the steps don't feel redundant but comforting. :-)