Ok, I lied 😛 I love scientific articles, professional journals, or any other name that can refer to these professional papers. They are nicely formatted, condensed pieces of knowledge that are super helpful guides for their paper’s specific niche. So far in my capstone project, these papers have been extraordinarily helpful in getting my bearings and answering facilitating questions. And, maybe one of the most useful features of these papers is the reference section. This allows the original paper to sure credit the source of an original idea. Better yet, they condense complex ideas to be into a single reference or chain of them. Now, after knowing all of that and openly confessing to the papers, why did I say they suck?
The qualm I have with these papers lies in the exact same place as my favorite aspect of them, the references. When papers are free or available to you through your institution, they are, without a doubt, great. But, since they have owners, this usually is not the case. Many of these amazing resources are locked behind a plethora of paper managing websites that charge a high premium for access or prints. Many papers, even translated to another language, seem to only be accessible from their country of origin. Sometimes, like with a book citation, the only way to get some important piece of information is to rent, buy, or find in a library that specific edition of the book. Which could be very expensive if it is a textbook. For example, one important paper that I want to view for my capstone project right now was published as an unclassified NATO Technical Report RDP. But it is unpublished despite being classified for PUBLIC RELEASE, as far as I can tell. Seemingly, the only way to currently get access to the paper right now is by being a government worker or defense contractor. And this paper was made nearly a decade ago!
For all of the annoying barriers to access, there is a far worse monster lurking inside the reference section. Dead links. Some papers I have come across just didn’t exist. Links would lead to 404s. Papers wouldn’t appear in any searches. Sometimes the only website hosting a paper would just not work. These are the true demons of citations that I don’t know how to fight. The previous problems could all be circumvented with effort or money, but this is a true dead end. It sucks.
But that was my rant on why scientific articles suck. Are there ways to change the system to fix these features of the papers? Sure, but I won’t go on a crusade to get it done. For example, the government could step in and mandate that papers be free and available to all. But that only removes the financial incentives to research and share. So I’ll leave the problem-solving to someone else. But, for now, I can still love scientific articles despite them sucking.
