[therobot24]

> There's plenty of zero-cost bits available to allow for articles of all sorts of lengths.

Straw man - i wasn't talking about cost, hard drive space, or any relation near what you're referring to.

> ...articles that are usually at least 100 pages long. These articles tend to be well-respected and highly cited.

Another straw man - why does length (short or long) correlate with quality again?

> Longer articles have many advantages in allowing for a more in-depth explanation

Ah the real comment. Ok. I definitely agree - longer usually means more space to explain.

> and it is certainly not the case that every reader wants papers shoe-horned into an artificial page limit.

So be it. There's usually an appendix or supplementary materials that can offer expanded derivations. Often the authors trim a lot of the fat for the published paper and put a longer version in a book/thesis.

> What a strange attitude!

As a writer of publications i want more space and agree, but as a reader of publications (way more than i write) there's just too much out there to spend my time going through 50+ pages. I can put in the time for 10-20 pages and if i still want more i'll check out other publications, appendix, supplementary, thesis...whatever. It's an important and necessary skill for academics to be able to concisely present their work - not just for publications, but for grant applications, presentations, etc.

[jsyedidia]

If you don't like to read long articles, don't read them. I like to read them; they tend to be much easier to understand than artificially shortened articles. It seems to me that complaining that somebody wrote a long article because they take too long for you to read is exactly analogous to saying that since you only like to read short stories, nobody should write a long novel because it would take too much time for you to read.

[eli_gottlieb]

Academic writing is dense. When you shorten the page limit, you force authors to make it denser, to explain less and rely more on the readers' previous knowledge. As a writer, I'm often surprised how easy it is fill pages and pages, and as a reader, I'd rather read clear expository prose than wizardly hand-waving.