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Showing posts from December, 2017

Reading #1 (and writing #5)--opaque scientific papers

This blog covers mostly reviewing papers, and a bit on writing papers.  But a post I saw in Facebook requires a discussion about reading scientific papers.  I covered this a little bit under "reviewing", but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to weigh in a bit more. There is a wonderful column from Science  that is worth linking to:   column here I remember those days. First, not all scientific articles are so bad.  But some surely are.  A lesson to be gained from reading such papers is how not  to write! Second, to my astonishment, almost 30 years after its publication, people still seem to be using my book, Understanding Paleoclimate from the pre-Quaternary Geologic Record  (Columbia University Press).  It is badly out of date.  It was partly out of date the day it appeared.  So why isn't it being completely ignored now?  I think it's because I have never fallen into the temptation of trying to sound erudite.  To me, the point of publication is to convey