Tag: writing

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Literature review

The 2025 Ig Nobel awards have just been announced. Someone at work had posted a link to the winner in the Physics category, which is a study of the clumping properties of Cacio e Pepe sauce, and I read the original source article. Apart from the physics involved, and the recipe suggestions, what struck me was how very readable the article is. The introduction and literature review is particularly to the point. As someone who knows a bit about cooking and the science involved, it does a nice job of setting the scene, and situating the current research in an up-to-date body of knowledge.

It reminded me of a recent article by Catherine E. De Vries: “Most Literature Reviews Miss the Point. Don’t Let Yours” (I’m afraid I don’t remember where I came across the article for a “via” link.) When doing my psychology diploma, I always found literature reviews both hard to read and to write. I understood that they had to be there, but I didn’t understand at a gut level why. A good literature review (like the one above) is a joy to read, though, and can sometimes provide the reader with more insight than the main paper itself. De Vries writes:

Too often, the literature review is treated as a box to tick before “real” writing begins. I think that’s a mistake. A literature review isn’t the background, it’s our orientation. It shows where we stand and why our next step matters.

[…]

The entrepreneur Steve Jobs once said: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backward.” A literature review is exactly that. We trace ideas backward, not out of nostalgia, but because doing so reveals the logic of where others have been, and what still needs to be built. We begin to see which things repeat, which evidence holds, and which questions remain unanswered.

Our question becomes less a leap of faith, and more an inevitable next step. We don’t invent it. We see it, emerging from the structure we’ve laid bare.

I think I kinda get it now!

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Academic writing

I’m taking a break from the OP course this year. Although I registered for the research project at the start of the academic year, I then immediately deferred it for a year, because otherwise I would have lost access to the library and student forums. Although the University Of London allows one to take the course over five years, its systems can’t cope with the idea that someone might not take any modules in a given year. Oh well.

I’m trying to keep my reading in the field to gather ideas for my own project, and to keep up with my classmates in the WhatsApp group that Mona set up, and learn from the experiences of others as they work towards their proposals. One thing that’s on my mind as classmates talk about how many references they should be expected to include in a 3000-word proposal, or whether in-line references are part of the word count, is the nature of academic writing in general.

I love science, I love writing, and I love good scientific writing, but the writers I admire most are more scientific educators than academics. Adam Mastroianni recently wrote about how academic incentives based on publications and citations (“publish or perish”) has also led to a perverse (my word, not his) writing style in scientific papers (via Miguel de Icaza on Mastodon):

For example, you used to be able to write a scientific paper with style. Now, in order to please reviewers, you have to write it like a legal contract. Papers used to begin like, “Help! A mysterious number is persecuting me,” and now they begin like, “Humans have been said, at various times and places, to exist, and even to have several qualities, or dimensions, or things that are true about them, but of course this needs further study (Smergdorf & Blugensnout, 1978; Stikkiwikket, 2002; von Fraud et al., 2018b)”. 

Adam Mastroianni, “The Rise and Fall of Peer Review”

He references a paper of his own, “Things could be better” (Mastroianni & Peery, 2022), which presents the results of nine rigorous studies in a very modern and informal style that tries to put the findings front and centre, without letting the language get in the way. For the purposes of reading it from start to finish, the paper is well-structured, but the difference between the article and a typical modern academic paper is like the difference between a chapter of Dickensian prose and a Twitter recap thread.

In the Research Methods module of the course we covered the “standard structure” of modern scientific papers: why they have a particular format (abstract, intro, methodology, results, discussion, conclusion) and why we shouldn’t read a paper linearly from start to finish. But, you know, I like reading a paper from start to finish. Precision and clarity of language is important, but so is acceptance and adoption.

In just about every single module of the OP course at Birkbeck the subject of the “academic-practitioner gap” comes up. I agree with Mastroianni that we can do better, and that we don’t have to sacrifice accuracy and rigour to make scientific more accessible to a wider audience. When it comes to writing, I look to people like Ed Yong at The Atlantic, and Beth Mole at Ars Technica as role models. I’d love to write my Masters dissertation in the style Mastroianni highlights, but I also want to get a good grade when I hand it in…

Additional notes:

  1. In her book Working Identity, Herminia Ibarra suggests the question, “who do you admire?” as a prompt for thinking about career direction. There are many reasons for me not to do a PhD after this Masters course, but one of them is that I just don’t aspire to continue to write in the academic style.
  2. Via Ted Pavlic on Mastodon, via Mark Rubin (source of many good links) I found another good article about clarity in academic writing: “Finding your scientific story by writing backwards” by Montagnes, Montagnes & Yang (2022). The authors discuss creating a “scientific story” by starting the writing process with results and conclusions, and working your way backwards to methodology and introduction. Going against the established order has risks as well. The old saying about needing to understand the rules before you can break them applies.