Ask HN: What's your biggest pain point when reading scientific papers?

3 points by velyan ↗ HN

5 comments

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Besides paywalls?

I wish the "Conclusion" section were easier to get to. It's sometimes re-stated in the first/summary paragraph - but I feel like every single time, I have to hunt for the meat of what was found by scrolling down to the conclusion.

In this regard I find medical papers much better than CS ones. The ones in medicine in the abstract write the methodology, the results the CI (confidence interval) and the conclusions.

Very good abstracts.

honestly? the formatting. I know we all love LaTeX and pdfs but reading them on a smartphone is an exercise in frustration. Printing them out isn't great for the planet and my Kindle is the regular size one.
1000 upvotes.

I wish papers were written in html or markdown... and the beautiful typography applied later with latex.

I would love it if authors would put the date the paper was written in the paper itself. I think that's standard for the iacr eprint archive, but sadly missing for many other disciplines.