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Jan. 20th, 2021 09:18tl;dr STEM papers SHOULD be readable by someone outside the field, and I wish to correct this misconception. (level of navel gazing: high, and probably of little interest to most people sdfjsl)
A week or so ago, there was a thing going around twitter about how it was presumptuous to expect humanities papers to be understandable by the non-expert in the field, because you'd never expect that for a STEM paper. Of course, I do agree with the underlying complaint here, which is the devaluation of humanities knowledge and specialties.
However, I was a bit shocked to read it, because I basically expect to be able to pick up a paper in any field and get the gist of it. While I'd miss plenty of subtlety and might not be able to meaningfully judge it against the other work in the field, and the more theoretical the field, the more that is true, I don't think this is an unusual expectation. A good paper positions itself in the field and is written in plain enough language that any jargon is frankly, googleable.
I fully admit that I am in a privileged place to say this: I have... a PhD in a STEM field, which uh, definitely teaches you how to read papers. But my first year courses in biology (which I subsequently dropped as a major, so it's not like I was particularly good at biology) were entirely paper reading based. We'd read a few papers and discuss them each class, and yes, obviously the professor chose them for their clarity and general readability, but it's not like those /weren't/ research papers.
Of course there are people like the professor who'd take the papers his students wrote, which were perfectly clear and well written, and add obfuscating language to them. But the resulting papers are still understandable to the outsider, just not fun to read.
I most admired my advisor for her clear communication skills, both in presentations and in papers. Her ability to be convincing and provide the base knowledge for her arguments is what drew me to her lab. That was, and still is, my idea of what a good science paper should be.
A week or so ago, there was a thing going around twitter about how it was presumptuous to expect humanities papers to be understandable by the non-expert in the field, because you'd never expect that for a STEM paper. Of course, I do agree with the underlying complaint here, which is the devaluation of humanities knowledge and specialties.
However, I was a bit shocked to read it, because I basically expect to be able to pick up a paper in any field and get the gist of it. While I'd miss plenty of subtlety and might not be able to meaningfully judge it against the other work in the field, and the more theoretical the field, the more that is true, I don't think this is an unusual expectation. A good paper positions itself in the field and is written in plain enough language that any jargon is frankly, googleable.
I fully admit that I am in a privileged place to say this: I have... a PhD in a STEM field, which uh, definitely teaches you how to read papers. But my first year courses in biology (which I subsequently dropped as a major, so it's not like I was particularly good at biology) were entirely paper reading based. We'd read a few papers and discuss them each class, and yes, obviously the professor chose them for their clarity and general readability, but it's not like those /weren't/ research papers.
Of course there are people like the professor who'd take the papers his students wrote, which were perfectly clear and well written, and add obfuscating language to them. But the resulting papers are still understandable to the outsider, just not fun to read.
I most admired my advisor for her clear communication skills, both in presentations and in papers. Her ability to be convincing and provide the base knowledge for her arguments is what drew me to her lab. That was, and still is, my idea of what a good science paper should be.
