[buildmonkey]

Footnotes make scientific work more accessible and enrich the conversation. In Laurie Garrett’s “The Coming Plague”, the footnotes alone are worth the price. Even in monographs, when reviewing literature in an area where I’m not a specialist, I find footnotes valuable.

[cubefox]

> Footnotes make scientific work more accessible and enrich the conversation.

I disagree. Readers have no way of knowing whether they can be safely skipped or not. Relevant information should go into the main text. If a paragraph starts out uninteresting enough, readers will skip it anyway.

[gmueckl]

Footnotes effectively have no place in CS, engineering or natural sciences. Other disciplines treat footnotes very differently, I think.

[suuuuuuuu]

This is certainly too strongly worded to be correct. I use footnotes quite a bit in my papers (physics) as a strategy to handle the "two audiences" problem - that many or most readers just skim for main ideas, but some (and those whom I might argue are more important) try to follow the details closely. I presently use footnotes for the latter audience for certain supplementary details or technical qualifications that would break the reading flow or add unnecessary length for the former.

I do appreciate the arguments that footnotes can be distracting, or that one doesn't know whether to skip them, but at present I see them as the best option for keeping the main body streamlined/as short as possible without sacrificing points that I'd like to make that wouldn't make for or fit into an appendix.

[MangoToupe]

I disagree completely. There are many different sorts of works you can publish relating to a given field, and some of them benefit from the asides and additional context that footnotes can provide, particularly pedagogical works targeting an audience of a wide breadth of experience.