You might be asking the wrong question. For example, the set of papers satisfying your first question:
What are the most important or personally influential academic papers you’ve ever read?
(call this set A)
has almost no overlap with what I would consider the set of papers satisfying:
Which ones are essential (or just good) for an informed person to have read?
(call this set B)
And this is for a couple of reasons. Scientific papers are written to communicate, “We have evidence of a result—here is our evidence, here is our result.” with fairly minimal grounding of where that result stands within the broader scientific literature. Yes, there’s an introduction section usually filled with a bunch of citations, and yes there’s a conclusion section, but papers are (at least in my field) usually directed at people that are already experts in what the paper is being written about (unless that paper is a review article).
And this is okay. Scientific papers are essentially rapid communications. They’re a condensed, “I did this!”. Sometimes they’re particularly well written and land in category A above. But I can’t think of a single paper in my A column that I’d want a layman to read. None of them would make any sense to an “informed” layman.
My B column would probably have really good popular books written by experts—something like Quantum Computing Since Democritus, or, like others have said, introductory level textbooks.
I didn’t mean the readers’ time: probably in average it takes me less to read an academic paper than to read a Slate Star Codex post, at least if the latter is tagged as “long post is long”. :-)
In a world of publish or perish and a lot of articles getting rejected I don’t thing the problem is that researchers don’t invest enough time in writing papers. It’s rather that there are incentives for writing in a way that signals sophistication.
Peer review also adds extra time for the communication process.
You might be asking the wrong question. For example, the set of papers satisfying your first question:
has almost no overlap with what I would consider the set of papers satisfying:
And this is for a couple of reasons. Scientific papers are written to communicate, “We have evidence of a result—here is our evidence, here is our result.” with fairly minimal grounding of where that result stands within the broader scientific literature. Yes, there’s an introduction section usually filled with a bunch of citations, and yes there’s a conclusion section, but papers are (at least in my field) usually directed at people that are already experts in what the paper is being written about (unless that paper is a review article).
And this is okay. Scientific papers are essentially rapid communications. They’re a condensed, “I did this!”. Sometimes they’re particularly well written and land in category A above. But I can’t think of a single paper in my A column that I’d want a layman to read. None of them would make any sense to an “informed” layman.
My B column would probably have really good popular books written by experts—something like Quantum Computing Since Democritus, or, like others have said, introductory level textbooks.
I acknowledge that they are separate questions.
I hope asking the wrong questions leads me to the right ones. Thank you.
LOL.
“I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one” I think the rapid part is in terms of the writer’s time, not the readers’.
Do you have an idea how long it takes to write and publish a paper in a peer-reviewed journal?
I didn’t mean the readers’ time: probably in average it takes me less to read an academic paper than to read a Slate Star Codex post, at least if the latter is tagged as “long post is long”. :-)
In a world of publish or perish and a lot of articles getting rejected I don’t thing the problem is that researchers don’t invest enough time in writing papers. It’s rather that there are incentives for writing in a way that signals sophistication.
Peer review also adds extra time for the communication process.