I often think that when reading or writing manuscripts for journal articles. The article ‘formula’ contains many, sorry, formulaic components. Here you have more context than necessary, with the corresponding citations, of course. Here you have the description of what was done with what, probably necessary. Here you have a painful description of the results, where we talk about each number in Table 3. Here you have them again, but compared to other people; look, they are in the same range, while these other ones contradict my arch-enemy’s results. Here you have some conclusions. Oops! Forgot the abstract at the beginning.
But what’s the point of the abstract and keywords in a world of search engines? And why do we need to cite so many People (2025), Researcher 1 et al. (2020), and that old classic by Old Guy (1973)? I mean, who has really read and understood that paper by Old Guy (1973)? It would be much more useful to have the code and the data for that nifty analysis you mentioned. Sorry, that’s available subject to reasonable requests. If we remove all the cruft from the manuscript perhaps it would take much shorter to publish. If it were just a blog post, or a short BiorXiv article then we wouldn’t need to spend a fortune in journal subscriptions. Just saying.
