> “Authors still create journals in prose-style — do we really need to produce all that text?”
I used to think that the answer was no, but recently I've become convinced that the answer is yes, we really do need to produce all that text. First, 'all that text' is really a misnomer, scientific papers are pretty dense (c. f any letter to Nature). Second, the audience here is not a machine, it's a human, and humans are inherently biased toward stories. The best papers have a story (in the journalism sense, no the fiction sense), and they use this story to make a convincing argument. Without the story, you have data and data is not an argument. As much as I'd like to believe that the data would be enough, we have to remember that we're not producing arguments in a vacuum. The audience comes to the table with a lot of preexisting ideas, biases and beliefs and unwinding these is non-trivial. Think about evolution and Origin of the Species. Looking at the data now, it seems so obvious, but even the data along with stacks of arguments was not enough to convince people for a very long time. It's work to re-write a person's mental models - all that text is needed to get the information in there.
I used to think that the answer was no, but recently I've become convinced that the answer is yes, we really do need to produce all that text. First, 'all that text' is really a misnomer, scientific papers are pretty dense (c. f any letter to Nature). Second, the audience here is not a machine, it's a human, and humans are inherently biased toward stories. The best papers have a story (in the journalism sense, no the fiction sense), and they use this story to make a convincing argument. Without the story, you have data and data is not an argument. As much as I'd like to believe that the data would be enough, we have to remember that we're not producing arguments in a vacuum. The audience comes to the table with a lot of preexisting ideas, biases and beliefs and unwinding these is non-trivial. Think about evolution and Origin of the Species. Looking at the data now, it seems so obvious, but even the data along with stacks of arguments was not enough to convince people for a very long time. It's work to re-write a person's mental models - all that text is needed to get the information in there.