General > General Technical Chat
Quality of academic papers
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hans:
The scientific community relies on redundancy to work. If there is only one paper claiming to have made some important discovery, then it virtually doesn't exist. If that discovery is then cited, re-tested, re-used, re-confirmed.. then you can start to build a pattern and knowledge.

I'm not amazed by these kinds of styling errors. Yes they should be caught, especially in a "journal" where reviewing should be a lot more strict than just a small conference.. but it does happen. I've seen some very big papers in my field with hundreds of citations at ACM/IEEE, but are written quite poorly in terms of spelling, punctuality, level of detail or structure.

Stuff like a graph displaying a handful of phasor diagrams with a dozen arrows and no labels. With the caption and article text saying: "Fig X. contains several phasor diagrams of the system in different circumstances, showing the various factors that may affect it". Well great, that tells me exactly nothing, except for if I didn't know what a phasor diagram is so I could look up these weird arrows.

Or a paper that tried to squeeze separate 2 designs into one article which were assembled together like a classic TV series, where they switch between scenes A and B to keep you sucked in to watch the whole thing. When I finally had sifted through both contributions, I concluded they could have been published independently, so why did I have to read through 20+ pages of 2-column text (with figures referenced 3 pages back and ahead) again to confuse myself?

Etc. I can probably rant for days. And to be fair, probably other academics will go off on my papers as well for their own reasons. It is what it is. Now if papers don't undermine anything on the quality and reproducibility of the research, then it's all fine. I think I would pattern-match these lines as if the graph was B/W thus on shape, which seems to make sense that a larger energy mixture corresponds to a faster developing wavefront.

--- Quote from: Someone on December 06, 2022, 11:19:29 pm ---
--- Quote from: TimFox on December 06, 2022, 11:02:11 pm ---It's not cheap:  a single-user "perpetual" purchase, with 1 year support is $679;  a single-user subscription is $329/year.
https://www.goldensoftware.com/products/grapher
--- End quote ---
Blimey! Glad there are open source alternatives these days:
https://matplotlib.org
and gnuplot as mentioned above by SiliconWizard:
http://www.gnuplot.info


--- End quote ---
Or my favorite: pgfplot package for Tikz in LaTeX.

Yes LaTeX is very fiddly and time consuming to use, but it does make very pretty documents and figures. And I'm always very happy with the level of control I've on my figures (like procedurally generate), and the ease of which I can keep them consistent between paperwork and presentation slides (also made in LaTeX), where I can put slide animations within my graphs or drawings if needed.
TimFox:
To be fair about the price, Grapher from Golden Software has far more functionality then I need, but I learned to like it.
coppercone2:
there is also a problem with fake papers that have fake data or doctored data etc. journals want the numbers for being bigger then other journals so its loosely enforced IMO

Someone:

--- Quote from: TimFox on December 07, 2022, 10:29:54 pm ---To be fair about the price, Grapher from Golden Software has far more functionality then I need, but I learned to like it.
--- End quote ---
For sure, plenty of people have bought various expensive packages (Matlab, or statistics platforms) just for the high quality and mouse driven plotting.
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