[freework]

> it was hard for me to understand some papers in closely related sub fields, and that was with working experience in that area.

I've noticed this too. The reason why I think this happens is because if you're an employed scientist, then the system is set up in such a way that you HAVE to publish, or else you lose your job. If someone criticizes your paper, and it gets pulled from publication, then thats the same as having never published anything in the first place. Therefore, the technique to survival is to write your paper in such a way that repels criticism as much as possible. The easiest way to do this is to write it in such a way that makes it hard to read, but not in such a way that makes it obvious it's gibberish.

[vapemaster]

> If someone criticizes your paper, and it gets pulled from publication, then thats the same as having never published anything in the first place. Therefore, the technique to survival is to write your paper in such a way that repels criticism as much as possible.

Not trying to be snarky, but that's not how publishing works.. you don't get a paper retracted for criticism, you get it retracted if there was scientific malfeasance. And retractions are actually exceedingly rare.

In fact having criticism / debate around your paper is a great way to get more citations, the real publication currency in academia...

[freework]

> you don't get a paper retracted for criticism, you get it retracted if there was scientific malfeasance.

Why would somebody criticize a scientific paper for something other than to point out some kind of scientific malfeasance?

If the paper is written in such a hard to understand manner, then its not possible to make any response at all. That's the point.

[timr]

> Why would somebody criticize a scientific paper for something other than to point out some kind of scientific malfeasance?

Because most papers are not actively deceptive, they're just wrong. Or if not just wrong, they've got some critical error. Even great papers. Most people don't seem to get this.

Out of every paper I've read in my life (easily in the thousands now), the number that I think are/were unquestionable I can count on one hand, and have fingers left over. Case in point: once I made the mistake of pulling the "source paper" on Okazaki fragments (a Nobel-caliber discovery on a core part of DNA replication) for a seminar I was teaching in biochemistry. I thought it would be neat to go back to the source material for such an important discovery.

What I didn't realize is that the original paper was...let's just say that it wasn't really conclusive. It didn't take long for my students to rip it apart, and I was chastened. I should have gone into it with the attitude that I was going to show them how hard and messy real science is. Instead, I feel like I made them believe that their textbook was wrong!

Science is Hard. Even stuff that is considered Nobel-worthy after years of post-hoc examination is rarely definitive when it first gets published. These "reporters" who rush out and breathlessly write a fawning/sensational/scary article about something after they half-read an abstract on arXiv, but question nothing within the article itself, are tremendous hacks.

[abdullahkhalids]

> The easiest way to do this is to write it in such a way that makes it hard to read, but not in such a way that makes it obvious it's gibberish.

I am not sure where these weird beliefs come from. Scientific papers are difficult to understand because it's incredibly difficult to explain things that have never been explained before [1]. I encourage anyone who has the above view to spend two years solving a difficult scientific problem, and then do a comprehensive summary in 10ish pages.

A more direct criticism of the above comment is that publication pressure is a very post-world war 2 thing. But you can pull random papers from earlier and find many of them extremely difficult to understand. Here is the 2nd most cited paper by Pauli from 1939 [2]. Try understanding what it truly says. This is one of the smartest humans to ever exist.

[1] To your knowledge at least. People who write bad papers, or do stuff similar to what has been done before often do it because they don't understand the work of others fully.

[2] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspa.1939...

[wolverine876]

I don't find them hard to understand, at least to a certain depth of understanding - but deep enough that I get a lot of value out of them, far more than news articles.

On the other hand, Avicenna claimed to have read Aristotle's Metaphysics 40 times before Avicenna could understand it. So it's not a new problem!