Reading through a scientific paper is often arduous. As authors, we usually want to present our ideas as fast as possible to meet the deadline for a conference. As a consequence, we may introduce a research dept and transfer all the labor to readers. They'll have to struggle to understand our work.
To address the problem scientists mainly from Google and OpenAI started in 2017 a new journal called Distill. The journal is focused on clear and easy to understand presentation of ideas.
This is the article about the research dept: https://distill.pub/2017/research-debt/
And the journal itself: https://distill.pub/
Suggested questions to discuss:
1. Do you think that it's the authors of research papers responsibility to present their ideas in an easy to understand manner? Or doing it accurately and precisely is enough?
2. Are visualizations or interactive presentations any helpful for explaining ideas in your field of research? Or maybe other means of communication work better?
3. Have you recently seen any work that helped you to understand some concept better?
I like this article about Attention Mechanism if you're interested: https://towardsdatascience.com/attn-illustrated-attention-5ec4ad276ee3
1. Do you think that it's the authors of research papers responsibility to present their ideas in an easy to understand manner? Or doing it accurately and precisely is enough?
ReplyDeleteI believe that there should be two versions of each scientific document, one written in a very professional language for specialists who know each other in a given field and will be able to understand the most advanced vocabulary and terminology without any problem. The second document should be a simplified version for non-advanced people who are just beginning their adventure with a given issue, or want to learn something that they had no previous contact with. It is particularly annoying to use artificially created words that have a simpler equivalent and do not need to use jargon.
2. Are visualizations or interactive presentations any helpful for explaining ideas in your field of research? Or maybe other means of communication work better?
Personally, I like the graphic form, especially the bullet points and really a summary of the issue, without artificial extension as is often the case. It is also very difficult to read a single, eternally elongated text, without any formatting, pointing to key issues. I think it is important to structure the document as if it were to be presented to a person who has never had a contact with a given subject.
3. Have you recently seen any work that helped you to understand some concept better?
Personally, I am using information in the form of video, in a faster way I am able to acquire knowledge, go to the moment in which the information that interests me is set. As for a technique that allows me to remember information in detail, I recommend a mind map, a technique that I have been using for many years and so far I have not found any better.
1. Do you think that it's the authors of research papers responsibility to present their ideas in an easy to understand manner? Or doing it accurately and precisely is enough?
ReplyDeletePapers should be written in a precise and professional manner. They do not have to be understandable for everyone - they must be understandable for people in a given area. Of course, a good editorial should also help in sifting out poor papers.
2. Are visualizations or interactive presentations any helpful for explaining ideas in your field of research? Or maybe other means of communication work better?
Yes, it seems to be helpful. I haven’t used such methods but I would like to. I am currently dealing with research of turbulent flows in musical instruments, so in this situation interactive presentations are very effective and present the physical phenomena well.
3. Have you recently seen any work that helped you to understand some concept better?
No, I haven’t seen it recently. Sometimes I use tutorials or videos but they do not use any innovative solutions. Basically, I feel the lack of such very modern technologies for presentation. When I think about the school where I work and about black boards, I feel like in the Middle Ages. Unfortunately, we have such conditions for today...
Thanks for the comment! Indeed, one may say that if black boards were enough in the past we shouldn't complain about them, but I really see the difference when learning something by reading a dull text and by engaging with smartly prepared visualizations. Although both means of presenting a material are important I think that visualizations are definitely much better for gaining an intuition about the subject.
Delete1. Do you think that it's the authors of research papers responsibility to present their ideas in an easy to understand manner? Or doing it accurately and precisely is enough?
ReplyDeleteI believe that the authors of scientific papers should present them as precisely as possible. The abstract should be written simply, clearly and inexplicably for even a layman. The article should be prepared in a professional manner and explain everything very carefully and in detail.
2. Are visualizations or interactive presentations any helpful for explaining ideas in your field of research? Or maybe other means of communication work better?
Yes, man is a visual. Therefore, all visualizations are very helpful in understanding a given topic. I love watching interactive presentations and all kinds of visualizations. In my opinion, this is the future.
3. Have you recently seen any work that helped you to understand some concept better?
Just not. As some of the researchers, we focus on old-style publications. Maybe we need to create a portal, for example a portal where we can publish our presentations and they would be scored like published articles? I believe that a presentation containing a 3D model or the 3D model itself, the phenomenon of behavior will give much more than its description. Doctors have found out about this and are printing 3D models before operations in order to better understand the issue.
Doctors create physical 3D models to prepare for operation? I didn't know, seems like very useful practice. I've only seen it in dentists' offices.
DeleteMe too I'm the fan of visualizations! They say that there are no shortcuts to understanding difficult concepts, but I don't doubt visualizations can be such shortcuts. But at the same time it takes a lot of effort and skill to present something in an easy to understand manner.
1. Do you think that it's the authors of research papers responsibility to present their ideas in an easy to understand manner? Or doing it accurately and precisely is enough?
ReplyDeleteI think that the authors of the publication should be as accurate and precise as possible. Of course, they should also make sure that the presented results are clear, otherwise the paper will discourage reading. I think, however, that the author is not responsible for it being understood by everyone, even those who are completely outside his or her field.
2. Are visualizations or interactive presentations any helpful for explaining ideas in your field of research? Or maybe other means of communication work better?
I'm in the field of bioinformatics. A lot of visualization is used to combine biology and computer science. A large number of graphs, heat maps and 3D models are useful. Biologists expect that they will get data in a form that is easy to assimilate, and not in a form such as a table in excel.
3. Have you recently seen any work that helped you to understand some concept better?
Today, in the era of the Internet, I do not have any problem with understanding at least the foundations of a concept. When I can't understand something, I look for other papers on the subject and it usually dispels my doubts. The problem may be a completely new, unprecedented solution, then you really have to rely on how the author of the work presented the problem and its solution.
1. In my opinion, the authors of the research should present their results in the most precise way for a given field. Scientific articles are read mostly by other industry scientists who understand specific scientific jargon. For them, the exact explanation of the phenomenon and the course of the author's reasoning counts. A more concise and more general description should always be characterized by an abstract, which should briefly summarize what is in the article. If the article is addressed to a popular science journal for a wider group of readers, the author should be interested in explaining the results of his research to the readers with simpler words.
ReplyDelete2. I think that interactive presentations are always more interesting than a regular slideshow. Often the visualization of a problem or specific elements of the problem, such as reaction of chemical compounds, allows listeners to better understand the topic we are talking about. My university always said "more pictures, less text". It's easier to interest someone with colored diagrams than a text wall.
3. If I have problems understanding an issue, I try to search for information in other articles or simply on the Internet. Sometimes a short specific description from Wikipedia is more accessible and faster to find than digging through a dozen or so articles. Youtube tutorials also often help. Recently, I have been working on the analysis of the Jack Rabbit II experiment with the release of chlorine into the atmosphere and the photos and videos from the experiment have allowed me to understand faster what was happening there than browsing through a dozen-page report.
Yes, YouTube videos are invaluable. I would ask for your favorite channels, but you mentioned the Jack Rabbit II project and it seems not overlapping with my field. Do I understand it correctly that it's about emergency planning rather than environmental effects of chemical contamination? So you're in the field of simulations of some kind?
Delete1. Do you think that it's the authors of research papers responsibility to present their ideas in an easy to understand manner? Or doing it accurately and precisely is enough?
ReplyDeleteI think that doing it accurately is the most important thing but it is recommended to do describe idea in understable way. They can only benefit from that because the easier to read the paper the more people do that and the probablity of citations increase.
2. Are visualizations or interactive presentations any helpful for explaining ideas in your field of research? Or maybe other means of communication work better?
Well prepared presentation can work and make easier to present some pictures or ideas. Nowadays we get used to interactive presentations but still the most important thing is communication.
3. Have you recently seen any work that helped you to understand some concept better?
Honestly I don't remember any scientific work. Sometimes I reads blogs or watch lectures to understand better some concepts.
1. Do you think that it's the authors of research papers responsibility to present their ideas in an easy to understand manner? Or doing it accurately and precisely is enough?
ReplyDeleteThe problem with scientific articles is that scientific articles force the author to be more careful and precise than popular scientific articles or press releases. Each scientific article has been reviewed at least once and most often twice by an anonymous reviewer - often a different, jealous scientist. A scientific article must separate the results from their interpretation and speculation, present in detail all the results and methods, and so on. And additionally the author does not care if someone reads his article, but only if he quotes it. The number of publication quotes (i.e. how many times an article has been quoted by other articles) correlates to a certain extent with the weight and value of the article.
2. Are visualizations or interactive presentations any helpful for explaining ideas in your field of research? Or maybe other means of communication work better?
Visualization is one of the tools for effective communication. In addition, people are usually visual and the use of graphics will make it easier for them to learn the facts. The correct use of graphic elements will allow to draw attention to the main information, will illustrate the disproportions between the presented data. The use of images can be helpful if you want to pass on negative data to the recipients. But in my field it is unlikely to work. For me, numbers are the most important.
I noticed something else - as long as the articles of English speakers are easy to understand (as long as you speak English), reading Indian or Spanish authors is a tragedy. Just recently, because of the topic I deal with, I had some contact with them. English articles despite the fact that they require knowledge of this language are written in a more accessible language than e.g. Polish. Poles have a tendency to exaggerate and unnecessarily complicate the language of expression. Writing out all the synonyms of a given expression, translating new terms into other terms, etc., etc. The content does not matter, only the form - because if the text is "scientific", then the content must be so.
I totally agree with your observation regarding "Polish style" scientific articles. Fortunately I don't have many occasions to read them. Of course I'm not a master of writing myself, but still, I very appreciate concise and clear papers. Maybe it's some general problem with out education, since elementary school you can be assigned to write 400 words essay or something like that and of course you struggle to do so, so you use strange wording and very complex sentence structure just to meet the quota. It then becomes a habit voila - you end up with "Polish style" articles.
Delete1. Do you think that it's the authors of research papers responsibility to present their ideas in an easy to understand manner? Or doing it accurately and precisely is enough?
ReplyDeleteI think that author often don't show all their result in papaers precisely enough. I suspect that in some cases it is intentional. I known at least 3 papers which result I was trying to achieve but it was just impossible. I think that result was just inflated and aren't true. In one paper I couldn't achieve them basen on test data which was contains to this paper and repeat all steps from paper.
2. Are visualizations or interactive presentations any helpful for explaining ideas in your field of research? Or maybe other means of communication work better?
That would be much more helpful. Speech is more natural and in shorter time we could show more that write about it.
3. Have you recently seen any work that helped you to understand some concept better?
I like this article about Attention Mechanism if you're interested: https://towardsdatascience.com/attn-illustrated-attention-5ec4ad276ee3
Documentation/paper about YOLO framework :D
Guy is funny and show many case is most easy way as it is possible!
I've seen that, indeed very funny :) Is this the same guy who attached cameras to dogs and wrote a paper about it? I bet he's a star at every conference he attends.
Delete1. Do you think that it's the authors of research papers responsibility to present their ideas in an easy to understand manner? Or doing it accurately and precisely is enough?
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion is all about sharing the results of the research and bringing knowledge to society, and not to just write a paper. In this light the most important thing is to reader be able to understand what author want to share. Sometimes scientist use the grammatical constructions that are so sophisticated and mashed up that it’s really hard to understand it, not mentioned the scientific meaning of this sentences.
2. Are visualizations or interactive presentations any helpful for explaining ideas in your field of research? Or maybe other means of communication work better?
The picture is worth thousand words and In my opinion this is always applicable statement.
3. Have you recently seen any work that helped you to understand some concept better?
I like this article about Attention Mechanism if you're interested: https://towardsdatascience.com/attn-illustrated-attention-5ec4ad276ee3
My fields of research and interest is currently evolving and expanding, so everyday something new is coming across. To be able to follow along the news I have to understand it, so I’m looking through the net until I find good explanation. It’s not always the same source but towards data science is one of the source I’m oftenly reed.
1. Do you think that it's the authors of research papers responsibility to present their ideas in an easy to understand manner? Or doing it accurately and precisely is enough?
ReplyDeleteI think researchers should present their work in easy to understand manner. That will help other researchers understand our article. Also important is to present results accurately and precisely. Someone how read our article should in their laboratory using our methods repeat experiment to verify our work or improve it.
2. Are visualizations or interactive presentations any helpful for explaining ideas in your field of research? Or maybe other means of communication work better?
I think that definitely yes. Presentations and visualizations are good methods to tell others about our interesting work. We could easily explain others how our methods work and describe in few step how to prepare everything to gain results.
3. Have you recently seen any work that helped you to understand some concept better?
I’m sometimes watch videos on YouTube and other sites. A while ago I watched a video in which researchers explain methods to resolve some problems and help used it in our work. I learned about using software to analyze EEG data and extract information using implemented algorithms. Lessons were provided by developers who works on university and created this methods.
Hello,
ReplyDeleteThanks for interesting and useful material and points to analyze.
Although it seems easy to write a research paper, actually in fact, this is often a messy and recursive process. In my opinion, obviously, this is author’s responsibility to present his ideas both: precisely, and adequately – I mean not easy, but in a simple way, respectively to the subject. That’s why the author must check overall organization: logical flow of introduction, coherence and depth of discussion in body, effectiveness of conclusion. He shall also take care of paragraph level concerns: topic sentences, sequence of ideas within paragraphs, use of details to support generalizations, summary sentences where necessary, use of transitions within and between paragraphs. Also sentence level concerns: sentence structure, word choices, punctuation, spelling, should be respectively adjusted. It makes sense to start off with a short introduction pointing out the reason for your study, how you did it (the method), and the salient findings. Of course, the presentation ends with your conclusion and recommendations.
An oral presentation is more than just reading a paper or set of slides to an audience. How you deliver your presentation is at least as important in effectively communicating your message as what you say. With the right materials, the right presentation software, and a little bit of time, you can visualize any data that you have in the form of a terrific presentation that sells your research better than numbers alone ever could. In many ways, presentations provide a unified experience where you can have text, images, video, and more. Remember that human beings are visual learners—visuals are processed up to 60,000 times faster than text and people have a much easier time understanding complex information when it is paired with relevant images as opposed to just text.
Actually I have no proper example of the material, which made me understand something better. In fact, standards of presentations are now so advanced, that it seems practically impossible to follow the author’s idea. To go into deeper knowledge, we always have to read a lot, one research paper or presentation cannot be enough to achieve it. It takes time :-)
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marta
Definitely it's not easy to write a good research paper as there are many important elements as you mentioned. Also I totally agree that the delivery of a presentation is as (or even more) important as its contents. At my work I have a very talented salesman. Everything he says sounds like it has a lot of value and meaning. Even if it's actually nothing you can still deconstruct his way of delivering his message and feel like you've learnt something :) I think that the same goes for presentations of scientific topics. Even if the results are weak, but the author presents them in some professional manner his work seems more valuable. Which is a little bit unfortunate of course.
DeleteHi, thank you for an interesting subject to discuss.
ReplyDelete1. Do you think that it's the authors of research papers responsibility to present their ideas in an easy to understand manner? Or doing it accurately and precisely is enough?
I think that it depends both on the audience of the research paper and its role. If you, as an author, targetting your research conclusions to the academic society, which is fluent in the field that you are describing, you don't need to go very deep with a form that is understandable to a wider audience. However, you need to know that everybody else has comparable knowledge in the field.
2. Are visualizations or interactive presentations any helpful for explaining ideas in your field of research? Or maybe other means of communication work better?
In my opinion, visualizations are very helpful, even for a creator! When you, as an author, are creating this form of expression you need to use your creativity on a very high level, to bring your advanced research onto an easily understandable form. Paradoxically, that may be the best helper not for the audience, but for the creator.
3. Have you recently seen any work that helped you to understand some concept better?
I have!
1) The Event Horizon Telescope results helped me to understand the concept of the black hole:
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7372
2) The great presentation on Tesla Autonomy Day helped me to understand machine learning and computer vision tasks in the context of autonomous driving: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE
It's an interesting point, indeed preparing visualizations or very well thought explanations of concepts may be the most beneficial for their authors! It probably really helps in gaining a deep understanding of them.
DeleteThanks for sharing the materials! I didn't know that making the image of the black hole required synchronization of many radio telescopes which was an accomplishment by itself.
1. Do you think that it's the authors of research papers responsibility to present their ideas in an easy to understand manner? Or doing it accurately and precisely is enough?
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion papers should be written in a precise, accurate and legible manner. What's more, I think that its content should be presented in such a way that the reader doesn't fall asleep while going through it and that it's comprehensive and easy to follow. It's easy to write something that is dull and illegible, but a really good researcher and writer is able to create work so that a layperson can grasp at least some major ideas connected with the concept under review.
2. Are visualizations or interactive presentations any helpful for explaining ideas in your field of research? Or maybe other means of communication work better?
Visualisations and interactive presentations are always helpful, no matter what field of science you're dealing with. :)
3. Have you recently seen any work that helped you to understand some concept better?
No, not really. Not recently.
1. Do you think that it's the authors of research papers responsibility to present their ideas in an easy to understand manner? Or doing it accurately and precisely is enough?
ReplyDeleteThere is no easy answer for such question. For sure scientific papers should be precise and accurate but in the same place, what is the actual value of paper if it is not understandable and easy to approach by readers.
2. Are visualizations or interactive presentations any helpful for explaining ideas in your field of research? Or maybe other means of communication work better?
Yest graphical presentation should have positive impact on the paper reception.
3. Have you recently seen any work that helped you to understand some concepts better?
I like this article about Attention Mechanism if you're interested: https://towardsdatascience.com/attn-illustrated-attention-5ec4ad276ee3
Scrum@Scale by Jeff Sutherland. I have found this work as really good explanation how to approach to organization scaling topic while agile tranformation.
1. Do you think that it's the authors of research papers responsibility to present their ideas in an easy to understand manner? Or doing it accurately and precisely is enough?
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, what scientific articles and their understanding can be fought infinitively, because each of us assimilates knowledge in different ways: we have, after all, visuals, who would prefer that the articles contain more graphics; we have listeners who would like new articles in the form of e-books, etc. Of course, the language of writing and the terminology used can also be debatable. It is worth noting that a specialist in a given field would prefer to read articles with sophisticated terminology, because otherwise he will be bored and there will be no increase in knowledge. It's good that we have a lot to choose from in a given field and we can tailor the article to your needs.
2. Are visualizations or interactive presentations any helpful for explaining ideas in your field of research? Or maybe other means of communication work better?
As I wrote in the answer to the first question, each of us assimilates knowledge in the best way for him, it depends on his learning style. Of course, the more techniques explaining or illustrating a given problem in the article, the better. The author should always leave the author the way of writing the article, because it is his product and he is responsible for it.
3. Have you recently seen any work that helped you to understand some concept better?
Of course, there were sometimes articles that are written in a comprehensible way and allow you to better understand the problem. However, as a novice researcher, most of the searched articles were difficult to understand, which made it much harder to explore the problem.
1. Do you think that it's the authors of research papers responsibility to present their ideas in an easy to understand manner? Or doing it accurately and precisely is enough?
ReplyDeleteMaybe not a responsibility in a strict sense, but a great boon. It's similar in other creative activities, for example in software engineering - ability to clearly communicate is (or should be) correlated with seniority. And I'm not sure if it can be taught, or just learned.
2. Are visualizations or interactive presentations any helpful for explaining ideas in your field of research? Or maybe other means of communication work better?
Both I've found to be very helpful. The thing is the difficulty to visualize an idea grows much faster than complexity of this idea. So it is common to see great visualizations of fundamentals, but the more complex the idea, the rarer it is explained well in visualization.
3. Have you recently seen any work that helped you to understand some concept better?
It happens to me all the time: 3Blue1Brown and Numberphile youtube channels.
1. Do you think that it's the authors of research papers responsibility to present their ideas in an easy to understand manner? Or doing it accurately and precisely is enough?
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion there is no need for the author of science paper to present the idea in the article in easy manner. First, when it comes to scientific publications, almost every potential reader is – at least on some level – oriented in the field of research. What is more, the main goal of making a great paper is to focus on its content and quality of the research. When You present Your outcomes precisely and accurately, then I think it should be enough.
2. Are visualizations or interactive presentations any helpful for explaining ideas in your field of research? Or maybe other means of communication work better?
In my field of research I think that visualization or interactive presentation may come in handy when You want Your readers or listeners to precisely understand what You want to say. What is more, this mean of communication is easier to understand and is way more interesting, so You have less chances that receivers will fall asleep during reading or listening ;)
3. Have you recently seen any work that helped you to understand some concept better?
Unfortunately in the last couple of weeks I haven’t had any spare time to read about some concepts and become familiar with presentations or visualizations related to it, so I must say that right know I can’t recall any interesting works that helped me understand some concept better.
1. Do you think that it's the authors of research papers responsibility to present their ideas in an easy to understand manner? Or doing it accurately and precisely is enough?
ReplyDeletePersonally I think that it is always an advantage of the article if it is written in clear and interesting manner. Not everyone has literature talent, so, to my mind, at least accurate and precise presentation is a must. But, I believe, that a person who really wants to be heard and understood should pay an effort making the article clear and interesting.
2. Are visualizations or interactive presentations any helpful for explaining ideas in your field of research? Or maybe other means of communication work better?
I think, that a graphical presentation always helps to address a topic better and to present the research results more transparently, so in any case it is an advantage for an article if it contains easy readable illustrations and graphs.
3. Have you recently seen any work that helped you to understand some concept better?
Yes, the most recent article I read is "Sequence-to-Sequence Learning With Neural Networks" which helped me to understand many concepts of modern machine translation in general and LSTM networks in particular.
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