[Al-Khwarizmi]

Clarity is and should be absolutely crucial, though.

As an academic I need to be up to date in my discipline, which means skimming hundreds of titles, dozens of abstracts and papers, and thoroughly reading several papers a week, in the context of a job that needs many other things done.

Papers that require 5x the time to read because they're unnecessarily unclear and I need to jump around deciphering what the authors mean are wasting me and many others' time (as are those with misleading titles or abstracts), and probably won't be read unless absolutely needed. They are better caught at the peer review stage. And lack of clarity can also often cause lack of reproducibility when some minor but necessary detail is left ambiguous.

[auggierose]

Clarity is relative. You can be super clear, but if it goes against what the reviewer thinks they know, it will be perceived as unclear. You can also point to references that clear up any remaining doubt about how something is meant, but of course the reviewer will never check out these references.

In the end, getting a paper accepted is a purely social game, and has not much to do with how clear your science is described, especially for truly novel research.

[intended]

That is not clarity in a paper.

1) The whole opening segment is the literature review.

2) If you are coming up with a novel concept, then you would be explaining how it shows up in relation to known fact.

Then you would be providing evidence and experiment.

The entire structure is designed to ensure as many affordances for the author to make their case.

Being accepted as a social game is the cynical view that ignores that academia still works. It’s academia itself which recognizes these issues and is trying to rectify the situation.

[auggierose]

As you have seen in the post (did you read it, dear reviewer?), references on the first page where unhelpful, so 1) comes already with a caveat.

And so on.

I think the social game view is at this point entirely justified, and there is nothing cynical about it. And no, academia does not still work.

A given "structure" is also ridiculous, and part of the problem. Once you care more about the form than the content, form is what prevails.

The truth is: To understand a paper properly, you need to deal with it properly, not just the 5 minutes it takes to skim the first pages and make up your opinion there already. Fifteen pages is short enough, and if you cannot commit to properly review this, for a week or so of dedicated study, just don't review it. We would all be better off for it.

[ancillary]

> The truth is: To understand a paper properly, you need to deal with it properly, not just the 5 minutes it takes to skim the first pages and make up your opinion there already. Fifteen pages is short enough, and if you cannot commit to properly review this, for a week or so of dedicated study, just don't review it. We would all be better off for it.

Reviewing dynamics make this hard. There is little to no reward for reviewers, and it is much easier to write a long and bad paper than it is to review it carefully (and LLMs have upset this balance even further). To suggest that every submitted paper should occupy several weeks of expert attention is to fundamentally misunderstand how many crappy papers are getting submitted.

[auggierose]

Not several. One full week would be enough.

To suggest that peer review means anything when this is not the case is the true fundamental misunderstanding here.

In other words: Fuck peer review. You are no peer of mine.