One of the required courses for my Masters is a literature review on a topic which we can choose ourselves. So I've been reading lots and lots of papers (on Bayesian networks for modelling gene regulation, in case you want to know), and the more I read, the more I can see certain common themes emerge. Not common themes about the topic, mind you, but just about papers in general.
First of all, most papers can be summarised pretty easily. However, the summary I would come up with almost never matches with the abstract that the authors wrote. I realise that this is a function of their desire to show every aspect of the paper in their abstract, while I would summarise the most important ones (which might be subjective), but I'm still left with the feeling that most abstracts are not reflective of the gyst of the paper.
Secondly, too many papers overuse references. I've read papers where there's two pages of text and three pages of references. What especially ticks me off is when the mentions a topic and then gives five references for it. We don't need five references, we need one good reference. Maybe two if there are two particularly good papers and you can't decide. Five is just overkill.
Thirdly, and finally, I've noticed a distinct lack of detail in some explanations. Now this is something I can understand if you're trying to boil down a paper to two or three pages for publication. But if you're going to gloss over something, at least say that you're doing so. Also, since this is the 21st century, how about providing a link to your webpage where more detailed information can be found?
No comments:
Post a Comment