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by k0stas
1675 days ago
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> 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. |
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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.