Journal articles are trying to do six things at once — no wonder they’re unreadable

Adam Mastroianni’s blog Experimental History is consistently fascinating. In a recent article on whether conversations end when people want them to, he makes this point, very much in passing:

Journal articles […] must simultaneously function as a scientific report, an instruction manual for someone who wants to redo your procedure, a plea to the journal’s gatekeepers, a defense against critics, a press release, and a job application.

This is a brilliant insight, and it explains so much about what’s wrong with journal articles. When you’re balancing all six requirements, how are you ever going to write something that people are going to actually enjoy reading?

Because I think Mastroianni missed out the seventh and most important thing that journal articles must do: they must tell a compelling story that communicates interesting information.

(You might think that’s what “function as a scientific report” means. In a perfect world, you’re right; in our present world, it often does not.)

I love that Mastroianni’s throwaway comment has clarified this issue so well. And I wonder how much, having now been made aware of this, Matt and I can consciously push back against that tendency.

looking at the six aspects of a paper listed in the original post and the seventh that I added, how do I feel about them all?

• a scientific report — this is important, for sure. In a sense, it what you leave behind. We still quote, for example, Hatcher 1901 all the time because it’s a solid scientific report.
• an instruction manual for someone who wants to redo your procedure — also very important in the experimental sciences, maybe the most important thing. But less so for many of kinds of palaeo papers that Matt and I write. I deeply wish this had been important to Stevens and Parrish (1999) in the original DinoMorph paper.
• a plea to the journal’s gatekeepers — sadly, unavoidable. If you don’t achieve this, then your paper simply doesn’t get published.
• a defense against critics — this, I’m not too bothered about, provided we make it past those critics who are gatekeepers. Once our work is published, it’s there to be shot at, and that is part of the process. I don’t especially want to make it harder for critics to bring legitimate criticisms about my published works.
• a press release — I think this is just a mistake: if you want a press release about your paper, you should write one. We’ve done this on occasion, but most papers are not going to be of interest to the general public and there’s no point in forcing the issue.
• and a job application — happily not a problem for Matt or me: he has tenure and I have anti-tenure — i.e. I don’t have a secure academic job but I don’t want one. I pity the people who do have to write their papers as recruitment-process fodder.
• a compelling narative — if we don’t achieve this, we’ve failed, simple as. Matt and I always aim to make our papers as comprehensible and as narratively coherent as we can — and we have been criticized by peer-reviewers for doing so.

In the end, the bits that matter to me are: presenting scientific information in a way that reads easily and draws the reader through, and enables other to build on the work (including by criticizing it). And to do that, I have to get it through the peer-review gauntlet.