Janet brings us some rather vitriolic criticism by Sir Peter Medewar:
The scientific paper in its orthodox form does embody a totally mistaken conception, even a travesty, of the nature of scientific thought.
The argument seems to be that the usual structure of a scientific paper reinforces the notion of science as a purely inductive process: we start with an empty mind, collect the data, and then proceed to deduce theories and models which explain them. This, people like Medewar argue, plays down the importance of generating ideas as a first step to doing science, by pretending that we use data to generate hypotheses, rather than also using hypotheses to design our experiments (and decide what the hell we’re going to research anyway). These are deep philosophical waters for an innocent geologist to swim in, but it seems to me that this criticism, whilst valid in a sense, misses an important point: we don’t write scientific papers for historians and philosophers of science. We write them for other scientists.
As such, and interesting as that might be, our major concern is not to provide a narrative of the often tortuous mental process which led us to the theory or model that we are presenting; whilst generating new hypotheses to test is a fundamental challenge for the individual scientist, the fact that the idea for flux capacitance popped into your head after you slipped off the toilet and banged your head is not relevant to your argument that flux capacitance makes time travel possible. Instead, our goal is to present the clearest and strongest possible scientific case for our models, in order to convince others in our field of its validity. Thus:
- You describe the background to the problem you’ve been investigating, and why it is important (Introduction).
- You explain how you did your experiments (Methods).
- You present the results for your experiments (Results).
- You explain what you think that your results mean (Discussion/Conclusions).
It’s true that we are imposing an artificial structure, but that’s because we’re trying to build a logical argument, not tell a story. This does not mean that preexisting or preliminary hypotheses should be ignored, of course; talking about competing hypotheses and their consequences in the introduction can be a vital part of the quest to show that your research is relevant and interesting. It is true that many papers fail to do this, but I’d suggest that this is more a symptom of bad writing than conscious fraud, or an attempt to meet some impossible inductive ideal.
However, the most troubling part of Sir Peter’s criticism is his particular disdain for the usual habit of separating the data, and the interpretation of said data, into separate ‘results’ and ‘discussion’ sections:
The section called “results” consists of a stream of factual information in which it is considered extremely bad form to discuss the significance of the results you are getting. You have to pretend that your mind is, so to speak, a virgin receptacle, an empty vessel, for information which floods into it from the external world for no reason which you yourself have revealed. You reserve all appraisal of the scientific evidence until the “discussion” section, and in the discussion you adopt the ludicrous pretense of asking yourself if the information you have collected actually means anything.
Again, he’s right that this division is not part of natural thought processes, which is why I spend most of my time when teaching field mapping trying to force the students to properly separate observation from interpretation (or, in many cases, actually record the observations which led to their interpretation, but I digress). The reason I do this, and the reason that this should always be done as much as possible in scientific papers, is that it increases the long-term value of the data, for the simple reason that our interpretations may be wrong. In fact, the scientific process almost guarantees that they will be wrong in at least some aspects, because it is continually generating new data which force refinements, or even major rethinks. Conclusions come and go, but good experimental data lives forever; therefore making the effort to keep the two separate mean that the latter can always be easily put back to work, constraining the improved models. If not, vital observations may languish in the middle of a few paragraphs of discredited extemporizing.
Don’t let me be misunderstood; I strongly believe that scientists should spend much more time talking about how they actually do science. But criticizing a scientific paper for not representing this process is invalid, because that is not what a scientific paper is designed for. We need to use other methods to tell that story, in more appropriate venues. Perhaps some sort of informal collection of musings about sciency things. We could even download them onto that Internet thing…
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