August 26th, 2006 Posted in Psychology

Why are journal articles so boring?

It may be an elitist, political device to shield science from the mainstream population and keep scientists in their jobs. Or it may be that shared specialist terminology and dense language is necessary to disseminate scientific findings and this results in tightly targeted, hard to read (for the layman) articles.

I propose that journals can and should be more accessible, entertaining and utilise more attractive designs. “The Psychologist” published by the BPS is incredibly dry in both writing style and its almost non-existent page design. Academic journals are too dry, mainstream magazines stylish but filled with fluff. There must be a middle ground – complex, well written academic research but with clear, easy to read language, a sense of humour and aesthetics. Being able to write dense language does make the research any better, and using straightforward language does not make good research any worse.

At the same time as language being more accessible, I propose the use of more subjective terms, for example using E-Prime. Rather than saying, and arguing over whether things “are” or “are not” a certain thing, probability and subjective viewpoints are emphasised. The whole basis of science is probability, so it seems absurd to me that scientists waste time arguing the toss and slating each other. Bearing in mind that experiments and statistics can both easily be manipulated to provide the results required to further you own ends, our fictitious squabbling scientists may well both be correct or incorrect.