Liberate the Article! Proposals for Simplified Scientific Writing Conventions

Abstract

A huge amount of advice and guidance has been provided on how to craft articles for top-tier journals. Simultaneously, research publications themselves have been criticized as formulaic or even nonsensical by some scholars. Despite this heated debate, the structural aspects of scientific texts have received little attention. The typical structure that articles are expected to follow and the typical story they are supposed to recount are presented as mere conventions that bear no consequences. In this essay, I discuss these taken-for-granted assumptions and analyze the significant costs and burdens generated by these conventions. I then propose to simplify writing conventions by focusing on the basic ingredients of research rather than the imposition of a rigid structure and a standard story. I argue that more freedom should be given to authors in the way they organize their papers. Such a reform would be easy to implement and would have mostly positive implications for all stakeholders.

Keywords

• scientific articles
• writing conventions
• text structure