[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Why are we hanging on to anachronistic acade...
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Ask HN: Why are we hanging on to anachronistic academic paper
formats
Academic papers are not only dense to read because of the technical
content, but the format/layout of the paper i.e. the 2 column
format with the distinct table styling etc isnt a very user
friendly/approachable look. Is there a good reason why this doesnt
change? Is it just that academics dont value aesthetics?
Author : dcreater
Score : 11 points
Date : 2024-04-08 17:27 UTC (5 hours ago)
| stareatgoats wrote:
| Agree, but it's a format that so so engrained in academia that
| it's not likely to change. But with the advent of LLMs that will
| readily read the paper and summarize it in the tone of voice of
| your choice this doesn't seem like an obstacle for people outside
| academia any more.
| zero-sharp wrote:
| Is the styling of the paper really a barrier to understanding?
| Like, sure, this _could_ benefit outsiders, but I don't think
| most technical papers are written with the purpose of being
| accessible or aesthetic. And that's absolutely not a fault of
| academia.
| lupire wrote:
| Why should academics torture each other with poorly formatted
| papers?
|
| We don't like reading these newspaper-column style papers any
| more than lay people do.
| somethingsome wrote:
| You don't like it.. I know many academics, and I'm one of
| them that like very much 2 column information dense papers..
| tlb wrote:
| There is some scientific publishing outside the standard format,
| sometimes corresponding to a conventional paper. To pick one I
| liked recently,
| https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~lqiang/rectflow/html/intro.html is
| nicer looking than the corresponding arXiv paper and has some
| animated figures that help visualize the process.
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| We are seeing a transformation where AI papers have a website
| that has code/paper/video and high level explainer. The paper is
| now subservient to the rest of the body of work.
|
| The one that I don't like is many venues have a 10 page max, so
| some papers end up getting golfed down to 10 pages and become
| impossible to read.
| lupire wrote:
| The paper is the disaster-proof archive format. Pre-apocalypse,
| there's no reason for anyone except the journal committee to
| read the content of a published paper.
|
| Any academic who wants to be read publishes in a more readable
| version of their research.
|
| I'm not sure how, but sometimes a well-formatted paper gets
| published Example:
|
| https://maartenfokkinga.github.io/utwente/mmf91m.pdf
| Quinzel wrote:
| I find recently published academic papers are using a more modern
| format/layout, and have abandoned the 2 column format. It's
| probably just a slow process getting people to adapt to change,
| and I doubt they go back and change the layout of older papers.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| Most humanities papers/journals have a much more readable and
| approachable single column format. The flipside, however, is that
| they eschew much of the clearly defined structure of scientific
| papers.
|
| Scientific paper formatting is because they are still, generally,
| actually paper-published. 2 column layouts, for instance, are
| actually quite readable on paper. Online articles tend to have
| single column styles.
|
| There is also very little "fiddling" in academic publishing.
| Journals/publishers tend to pick a template and styling system
| and funnel everything into that single style regardless of
| content. They are usually thinly staffed and want to enforce
| aesthetic standardization article to article to reduce
| typesetting workload and to ward off any claims of favoritism.
| nextos wrote:
| Format is anachronistic, but other things are even worse.
|
| For instance, a typical review process in _Nature_ or _Cell_
| takes around 12 months these days. Lots of waiting, back and
| forth messages, and waste. If you get rejected, switching from
| one journal to the other implies massive changes to format and
| rewriting, as the length constraints could not be more different.
|
| Computer Science has a much more dynamic publication culture.
| davisoneee wrote:
| I think it's not so much that academics don't value aesthetics or
| don't want to change as that the alternates are NOT _strictly_
| better. It's all tradeoffs. And we are used to changing template
| to submit to different journals, so it's not that much of an
| issue.
|
| Extensive or summarised background? -- You don't want extensive
| background material padding every paper out with several more
| pages, so once you're familiar with 'the literature' (the key
| background details), often you can quickly skim and get an idea
| of the baseline of the paper just from specific citations
|
| Citation formats? -- some citation formats are better than
| others...I usually publish in journals using IEEE/numeric, which
| can be denser but requires flicking to the Bibliography...names
| can make it easier to recall the gist of a paper if it's a famous
| one like the 'Hinton' or whatnot, but can really pad out content
| if you have strings of names inline
|
| Papers too short/page limits? -- You don't want pages and pages
| of content, otherwise the paper is likely contributing _more than
| one idea_, and so is less focused (and also kind of dilutes the
| review process). If a paper contributes A and B, but B is weak,
| do you still let it through if A is great? If the contributions
| are distinct, you can easily have an A paper and then request
| some more work for B.
|
| 2-column? -- 2-column and dense can make it easier to quickly
| jump from section to section, or get more information on a single
| page...so when reading in print format (or digitally with full-
| page view), you can easily see what was said earlier on a page,
| whereas 1-column tends to have much larger font so less content-
| dense.
|
| I don't think we are at optimum, but I don't think ANY new format
| that's been proposed gives such a noticeable benefit to some of
| these areas as to overtake. Fully digital with hovers and links
| and stuff may be useful, but would completely regress when
| printed out for reading and annotating.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Do you have a better LaTeX template? Nothing but TeX does the
| math rendering well so stuck with that.
|
| You'll notice that GPT-4 Technical Report uses single column
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.08774
|
| So some variants exist. They print well. Colours are more
| annoying to print.
| somethingsome wrote:
| 2 column is so helpful in reading the paper imo. It's easier to
| jump and see previous parts, no need for page width equations
| that use a lot of empty space. And basically the style is
| enjoyable for me, I really don't see what is not approcheable.
|
| Having a different style of the paper will not magically make it
| easier to understand. Focusing too much on the format instead of
| the content is counter productive.. And having somewhat
| standardized sections allows an academic to jump to juicy parts
| with enough experience.
| bjourne wrote:
| It's absolutely trash for accessibility. Most pdf readers can
| reflow text when the file uses only one column but not so with
| two-column files. I.e reading two-column articles on cell
| phones is pretty awful. The real reason most articles are two-
| column is because "it looks more professional" which is the
| kind of cargo-culting OP rallies against.
| gpderetta wrote:
| As someone that occasionally reads academic papers (but doesn't
| write them), the only change I really want is for an explicit
| publication date.
| mo_42 wrote:
| Probably because everyone needs to make an academic career
| nowadays. To make an academic career you need to get published in
| prestigious journals or conferences. These prestigious publishers
| are rather established and hence still stick to their ancient
| LaTeX template.
|
| In an ideal world, every publication would be more similar to a
| Git repository or a website that contains all the code for the
| statistical evaluations and, of course, the raw data that was
| collected initially The code would document why a certain sample
| was excluded etc. Of course, the results wouldn't be presented in
| dry tables or bar charts. There would be interactive
| visualizations that support the understanding of the data and
| results. All this would be integrated into the text. Of course,
| such a text would have real hyperlinks to other works without the
| need to go to a reference section and look up a publication.
|
| If a publication would fail to replicate, the original authors or
| their academic offspring would add a remark that this work is
| superseeded by some other work.
|
| Needless to say that all this has been proposed already in
| publications ironically in PDF. Also noteworthy that Berners-Lee
| proposed the WWW 35 years ago, which basically implements this.
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