I notice that academic papers have stupidly long, hard-to-read abstracts. My understanding is that this is because there is some kind of norm about papers having the abstract be one paragraph, while the word-count limit tends to be… much longer than a paragraph (250 − 500 words).
Can… can we just fix this? Can we either say “your abstract needs to be a goddamn paragraph, which is like 100 words”, or “the abstract is a cover letter that should be about one page long, and it can have multiple linebreaks and it’s fine.”
(My guess is that the best equilibrium is “People keep doing the thing currently-called-abstracts, and start treating them as ‘has to fit on one page’, with paragraph breaks, and then also people start writing a 2-3 sentence thing that’s more like “the single actual-paragraph that you’d read if you were skimming through a list of papers.”)
Another reason is that you’re not supposed to put references in the abstract. So if you want people outside your narrow subfield to have a chance at understanding the abstract, you need to reexplain the basic ideas behind the whole research approach. That takes space, and is usually very weird.
My sense is that they are not that hard to read for people in the relevant discipline, and there’s absolutely no pressure for the papers to be legible to people outside the relevant discipline.
I feel like paragraph breaks in a 400 word document seem straightforwardly valuable for legibility, however well versed you are in a field. In someone posts a wall of text in LW I tell them to break it up even if it’s my field.
Okay it looks like for the particular thing I most recently was annoyed by, it’s 150 words.
This thing:
Although much recent attention has focused on identifying domain-specific taxonomic differences in cognition, little effort has been directed towards investigating whether domain-general differences also exist. We therefore conducted a meta-analysis of published nonhuman primate cognition studies, testing the prediction that some taxa outperform others across a range of testing situations. First, within each of nine experimental paradigms with interspecific variation, we grouped studies by their procedures and the characteristics of their study subjects. Then, using Bayesian latent variable methods, we tested whether taxonomic differences consistently held within or across paradigms. No genus performed especially well within particular paradigms, but genera differed significantly in overall performance. In addition, there was evidence of variation at higher taxonomic levels; most notably, great apes significantly outperformed other lineages. These results cannot be readily explained by perceptual biases or any other contextual confound and instead suggest that primate taxa differ in some kind of domain-general ability
Really seems to me like it’s supposed to be this thing:
Although much recent attention has focused on identifying domain-specific taxonomic differences in cognition, little effort has been directed towards investigating whether domain-general differences also exist. We therefore conducted a meta-analysis of published nonhuman primate cognition studies, testing the prediction that some taxa outperform others across a range of testing situations.
First, within each of nine experimental paradigms with interspecific variation, we grouped studies by their procedures and the characteristics of their study subjects. Then, using Bayesian latent variable methods, we tested whether taxonomic differences consistently held within or across paradigms.
No genus performed especially well within particular paradigms, but genera differed significantly in overall performance. In addition, there was evidence of variation at higher taxonomic levels; most notably, great apes significantly outperformed other lineages. These results cannot be readily explained by perceptual biases or any other contextual confound and instead suggest that primate taxa differ in some kind of domain-general ability
I do think, like, man, I wanted to know about primatology, and it seems pretty silly to assume that science should only be relevant to specialists in a field. Especially when the solution is literally just inserting two paragraph breaks.
(I might also make claims that academic papers should be doing more effortful things to be legible, but this just seemed like a fairly straightforward thing that was more of an obviously-bad-equilibrium than a “there’s a big effortful thing I think other people should do for other-other-people’s benefit.”)
I notice that academic papers have stupidly long, hard-to-read abstracts. My understanding is that this is because there is some kind of norm about papers having the abstract be one paragraph, while the word-count limit tends to be… much longer than a paragraph (250 − 500 words).
Can… can we just fix this? Can we either say “your abstract needs to be a goddamn paragraph, which is like 100 words”, or “the abstract is a cover letter that should be about one page long, and it can have multiple linebreaks and it’s fine.”
(My guess is that the best equilibrium is “People keep doing the thing currently-called-abstracts, and start treating them as ‘has to fit on one page’, with paragraph breaks, and then also people start writing a 2-3 sentence thing that’s more like “the single actual-paragraph that you’d read if you were skimming through a list of papers.”)
Some journals, like Futures, require 5 short phrases as highlights summarising key ideas as addition to the abstract. See e.g. here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328719303507?via%3Dihub
“Highlights
The stable climate of the Holocene made agriculture and civilization possible. The unstable Pleistocene climate made it impossible before then.
•
Human societies after agriculture were characterized by overshoot and collapse. Climate change frequently drove these collapses.
•
Business-as-usual estimates indicate that the climate will warm by 3°C-4 °C by 2100 and by as much as 8°–10 °C after that.
•
Future climate change will return planet Earth to the unstable climatic conditions of the Pleistocene and agriculture will be impossible.
•
Human society will once again be characterized by hunting and gathering.”
Another reason is that you’re not supposed to put references in the abstract. So if you want people outside your narrow subfield to have a chance at understanding the abstract, you need to reexplain the basic ideas behind the whole research approach. That takes space, and is usually very weird.
My sense is that they are not that hard to read for people in the relevant discipline, and there’s absolutely no pressure for the papers to be legible to people outside the relevant discipline.
I feel like paragraph breaks in a 400 word document seem straightforwardly valuable for legibility, however well versed you are in a field. In someone posts a wall of text in LW I tell them to break it up even if it’s my field.
Okay it looks like for the particular thing I most recently was annoyed by, it’s 150 words.
This thing:
Really seems to me like it’s supposed to be this thing:
RIP the concept of copy-pasting from a PDF.
I admit that that is a little more legible to me, although I’m not a researcher in the field of primatology.
I do think, like, man, I wanted to know about primatology, and it seems pretty silly to assume that science should only be relevant to specialists in a field. Especially when the solution is literally just inserting two paragraph breaks.
(I might also make claims that academic papers should be doing more effortful things to be legible, but this just seemed like a fairly straightforward thing that was more of an obviously-bad-equilibrium than a “there’s a big effortful thing I think other people should do for other-other-people’s benefit.”)