Scicomm

The identity of scientific papers

VM

28 Dec 2022 — 5 min read

This prompt arose in response to Stuart Ritchie's response to a suggestion in an editorial "first published last year but currently getting some attention on Twitter" – that scientists should write their scientific papers as if they were telling a story, with a beginning, middle and end. The act of storytelling produces something entertaining by definition, but it isn't the same as when people build stories around what they know. That is, people build stories around what they know but that knowledge, when it is first produced, isn't and in fact can't be reliably produced through acts of storytelling. This is Ritchie's point, and it's clearly true. As Ash Jogalekar commented on Twitter on Ritchie's post

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