[plopilop]

I clearly despise academics (and the papers they write) who think that everything should look novel by hiding your thought process.

Sadly, especially in fields where conferences are favored over journals, this seems to be common: you only have a single chance of impressing the reviewer, so you lose little by hiding your thought process, and if possible make your result look more complicated that it actually is.

Many papers I read look needlessly complicated, and I cannot help but wonder why the authors chose this style. I've already been rejected because reviewers found my contributions too simple, however I'd say that the majority prefer to highlight the fact that the paper is "easy to understand". (Of course, sometimes you also need to get told that your contributions are minimal).

Sometimes, I wonder if I have this point of view because some academics like to hide their simple result under a mountain of useless rigor, or because I'm not smart enough to comprehend the necessity of the above rigor and I'm just a dumb engineer who chanced into research. I'd say both are true, but usually not at the same time: some papers are clearly hiding a small contributions, while some are just above me.

[psychphysic]

I think there is a balance to be struck and certainly don't want to say oh well there should be another journal for that.

But before the internet elaborate pedagogical papers simply took up to much paper real estate and so brief punchy result dense work was produced.

Im won over by the article in preprint then elaboration blog posts theme we see more in maths.

[ISL]

Physics has the same strategy: Important and timely results appear in the four-page (now four-page-ish) PRL and the long-term paper wrapping it up appears in PRD (or PRA, PRB, PRC, or PRE).

Only drawback is that people primarily read PRL, so people try to squash long-form results into PRL alone.