Reading Academic Papers Is a Nightmare

• June 21, 2025
• thoughts  
• education  
• research  
• learning  
• academia  

If you’re out there thinking, “damn, what else is new?” then shut up. I know. Please, let me complain.

So I’ve been saying for a while that reading academic papers is a skill. However, what I didn’t realize is that having a pretty good idea of how to read a paper from one discipline doesn’t quite map to knowing how to approach a paper from another field. Academic papers are all confusing nightmares, but papers from different disciplines are nightmarish in different ways, which means that while some parts of the basic reading approach can stay the same, others will have to be discarded or relearned.

Damn, I love exploring at the edge of human knowledge. Do you know why it’s called the edge of knowledge? It’s because it’s fuzzy and ill-defined and no one bothers to explain themselves while they hang out there.

Ah, yes, gotta love academia.

Unlike papers in the sciences, which come with a pretty standard structure, papers in English and philosophy, as far as I can tell, do not have one. They’re really just long-form essays, except incredibly dense and filled with jargon I don’t understand (well, more jargon than usual) and referencing texts and thinkers I’ve never read or even heard of. Maybe I’m just illiterate and have no idea how to read these papers, but as best as I can tell, the best way to figure out what the main idea is in such a paper is to read the entire paper. I read a few such papers in an English course I took this summer, and honestly, sometimes I surfaced from a pretty in-depth reading session with only a vague idea, if any, of what the author’s main argument actually was. I can’t always tell if the goal of English papers is to make a point (if so, please make it easier for me to find!) or if it is to show off how much reading the author has done while pretending to make a point.¹

Well, I guess the real point of writing papers in the humanities is to put different ideas into conversation with each other. But does doing so need to require an argument? I don’t know. On the flipside, does making an argument more explicit and easier to find diminish the author’s ability to put different ideas into conversation with each other? Well, I don’t have the “real” or “accepted” answer to this, since I know nothing about scholarship practices in the humanities, but my guess is that the answer is “no, it doesn’t diminish anything, but people don’t do this for cultural reasons.”²

If only academics could write more clearly, so much of my life would be easier. Alas, there are these pesky things called “disciplinary traditions” and “time-constraints” and “publication pressure” and “page counts.”

Right, so on the topic of page counts, one of the things I’ve been realizing lately is that a lot of really important information gets cut out of academic papers, and I suspect it is due to page count. For example, the methodology might say something like “we did x” with no further details, leaving you, the reader, to figure out what “x” means, in the first place, and then, how exactly it was done. Different papers covering the same area might use different terminology to refer to the same idea, or similar terminology to refer to different ideas. Sometimes I feel like I might need a table or a glossary to keep track of all of the competing definitions I come across. (Wait… maybe I should actually make one of those.)

And with experiment-based papers, of course, there are all sorts of details about setup and implementation that you’re expected to just know, or else you miss important details in the paper. Unlike math papers, which straight up announce how hard they are to understand, experiment-based papers appear easier to read (because they’re written in English, not math) while still requiring a lot of background knowledge to truly understand them. I find that figuring out what the appropriate background knowledge is becomes significantly harder in those cases, because your knowledge gaps don’t announce themselves as you read, until someone points them out to you or you try to implement what you’re reading.

You know, I’m starting to suspect that the best way to fully understand what an academic paper is doing is to spend time replicating exactly what it did and trying to replicate its results. But replication isn’t really valued in academia, is it? How does one get funding to run experiments with already known conclusions?

Thinking about this stuff really makes me miss math. Don’t get me wrong, math papers are their own special kind of hell. They read like they’re written in a different language and I’ve been known to spend days trying to understand a single paragraph in a paper. But you know what’s great about math? Most math papers are organized with a similar structure, so you know where to find things. Proofs are (more or less) communicated in a linear fashion.³ And math is, more or less, self-contained. Sure, you might need to go learn about other areas of math to understand what is going on, but you can learn enough math to understand any given paper almost entirely through working through other papers and textbooks. While it’s that same self-containedness and insularity that annoys me about math a lot of the time, I can’t help but admit that it’s appealing sometimes.

Societies are messy. People are messy. Systems are messy. Literature is messy. Math can be messy too, but like… it’s not messy in illogical ways, if that makes any sense?