I have a personal interest in divulgative work, as I feel an intrinsic issue in research is spreading too thin in branches of knowledge without paying attention what other branches are doing. The novelty of ideas and the research on them has merit, but what I truly appreciate are survey papers that let you build a perspective. In the research world, where you often need to combine knowledge in very compartimentalized subfields and jump into new ones these papers are invaluable.

Research is hard to comprehend

Another reason why I think divulgative work is important is the fact that it is unreasonable for a general public to read any research study and understand it. We all have experienced news that get misrepresented, viralized and end up disinteresting the general public. Quite often some new technology changes a lot our daily lives without our readiness, and I strongly believe that with informed choices we would all make the world a better place.

(nearly) Everyone is general public.

The “general public” also is much wider than most people consider. Ask the average “techie programmer” whether Android is open-source or not. Or even, ask them where to properly search for accurate information on it. Ask about which common-place messaging apps respect your privacy and to which degree. Ask about which extremely important software is mantained by a single person with multiple industries hanging on it (surely that would be unreasonable, right?). Ask the average python developer the differences between python2 and python3.

I am using these as examples from the tech development field; but the more I read research the more I am convinced the same applies to it. Papers of the year with no replicability (due to bad documentation), general unawareness of metrics and no effort on cohesion are commonplace.

Merit is in simplicity not in complexity.

There is also a push for prose (which I would argue does not help argumentation). Papers tend to turn extremely verbose in a way that does not necessarily help their understandability. Even with full knowledge of all the “obscure technological terms” that are presented in a paper, rare is the occasion where I do not have to go over them several times to really get all the conclusions that are obtained. I strongly feel like the issue happens because of adjusting to the template that is used, but a simple argumentative structure (initial axioms, assumed conditions, conclusions) would in most cases suffice and make the reading much more replicable.

I plan on sticking to more concise writing when summarizing personal research.

Proper contextualization shows expertise

What is a good guitar player? Surely, not an ace into a single musical style with the same chords, or someone who can play a single melody as the best in the world. Expertise is defined by being able to handle yourself in a variety of contexts, not excel in a single one.

This point goes back to what I argued in Section 2. The lack of pedagogicly written papers discourages many researchers from stepping into a field when they are knowledgeable in the state-of-the-art. I believe that competence is compounding; thus hyper-specialization leads to less capable (and quite often territorial) researchers.