Talk:2456: Types of Scientific Paper

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 17:11, 29 April 2021 by 162.158.62.157 (talk)
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I've a feeling we could find actual papers that paraphrase down to those in the comic. Also, lol at the 500 scientists' "citation" section. 162.158.159.104 20:36, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

As we edit this we should probably pay attention to the content / layout of the article images: The number of lines beneath the title and layout of each "paper" he's drawn could be relevant to the joke. For example, the "500 scientists" presumably have a massive authors list, and the one on how "everyone else is doing it wrong" has a single author and a particularly "article-esque" layout.

172.68.132.45 21:04, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

True. Do you think we should add another column describing the pictured paper to the explanation chart?

Reywas (talk) 21:06, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

For the "student volunteers" paper, many experiments involve adding hurdles for the participants to deal with. Like interrupting them, depriving them of sleep, adding distracting information, etc. It's not uncommon that these make them worse at the tasks. So this is just another research paper like that. Barmar (talk) 01:24, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

Isn't the 'hurdles' style of paper WAY more common than the proposed psychological experiment? It's describing a simple tasks cognitive function test. They run those all the time to prove the effects of oxygen, caffeine, sleep, sugar, music, trauma, comfortable chairs, the color yellow, etc. I can't recall seeing ANY paper like the suggested psychology experiment to make people unlearn skills, let alone enough for that to be a whole category.

Nobody has pointed out that the "Maybe all these categories are wrong" title directly pertains to this very comic... John.Adriaan (talk) 02:17, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

I think that’s the more likely ‘correct’ interpretation, honestly. Maybe we should add more detail now that it’s mentioned? Tague (talk) 12:56, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

Should we add another colum to include the corresponding LaTeX template? Some of them seem like that could easily be found.

These are titles of papers, so shouldn't each word be capitalized? For example: "We Put a Camera Somewhere New". I realize that the original is in all caps, but that's because that's the usual format for comics . . . . 172.68.57.179 10:45, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

Paper titles are usually not capitalized, contrary to journal names. You can see an example at the Higgs Boson paper cited in the comic description (there are, of course, others.) 141.101.105.134 11:32, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

Why does the explanation say "There are no headers" for the "We put a camera somewhere new" paper? I assume "headers" refers to "section headers", of which I see more in the camera-paper than in e.g. the immune system-paper (or the old records-paper). 141.101.96.28 11:25, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

Probably referring to the lack of actual legible text for us to comment on the content of the paper. Tague (talk) 12:49, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
I feel that the assumption made in a lot of the table that the text in each Paper is meant to be their literal title, is wrong. It strikes me more as an humorous explanation of "what sort of paper this is" for instance the first paper would indicate that a relevant category of scientific papers are about a camera being put someplace new and the data/photo's gathered from that, rather than an example of "clickbait". The actual papers in that category would presumably have an actual name relating to where the camera was actually put. 14:29, 29 April 2021 (UTC)~
I interpret them as a mix of "over-generalized" headlines and less-than-literal summaries of that general sort of paper's content. Tague (talk) 14:41, 29 April 2021 (UTC)