Ethics, part 2: Don’t waste the reader’s time

Previously published as: Hart, G. 2020. Ethics, part II: Don’t waste the reader’s time. <https://www.worldts.com/english-writing/eigo-ronbun72/index.html>

In part 1 of this article, I defined ethics as the branch of philosophy that studies right and wrong actions. I also discussed two important ethical requirements for research: designing reliable research and rigorously checking your data and calculations. In both cases, the ethical component arises from the consequences for readers of your papers. In the present article, I will focus on the negative consequences that result from wasting a reader’s time. Nobody has as much time as we want to meet our responsibilities to our profession, family, friends, and colleagues. Since time is a precious resource, it’s unethical to waste a reader’s time.

Several categories of time-wasting problems should be eliminated from your writing:

Most researchers enjoy reading, but we rarely have time to read work-related articles only for enjoyment. Most reading is done to obtain information that answers a question, and we need to accomplish that goal quickly and efficiently. Unnecessarily long papers interfere with that goal. Thus, every researcher should write as concisely as possible. Reducing the length of a paper by 10% reduces the time required to read it by 10%. There are several ways to accomplish this.

First, describe only the most important results—key results that answer the research questions or test the research hypotheses you described in the Introduction. For example, if you describe a figure or table, describe averages or medians if the central tendency is most important or ranges if the variation is most important. If both are equally important, provide the mean plus or minus the standard deviation or standard error. Focus on statistically significant results that also have practical significance.

Second, minimize repetition of information. It’s necessary to describe key results in the Abstract, Results, and Discussion, but try to minimize the length of the repeated text.

Third, avoid multi-word phrases when simpler and shorter alternatives exist. For example, if you refer to your “laboratory trial of a 3 by 2 factorial design”, you can subsequently replace this nine-word phrase by two words: “our study”. It may be helpful to repeat the full description occasionally, such as at the start of the Discussion, but after readers understand the nature of your study, it’s rarely necessary to repeat that information unless you are comparing specific details of your study with the corresponding details for another study.

Abbreviations seem like a good way to shorten a paper, but may cost more time than they save. Familiar abbreviations such as DNA or ANOVA aren’t a problem; readers don’t have to stop and determine their meaning. As a result, using them efficiently reduces a manuscript’s length. However, unfamiliar abbreviations force readers to stop and remember their meaning; they may even have to search through the manuscript to find the definition. Even if you helpfully provide definitions of abbreviations at the start of your paper, consulting those definitions still wastes time.  

Clarifying your writing is a valuable investment of time. Each time a reader stops and reads a sentence again, you have doubled the time they spent trying to understand its meaning. Any misunderstanding creates further delays when that misunderstanding prevents them from understanding something later in the manuscript and forces them to find and read the original description to solve that problem. One effective way to improve clarity is by letting several days pass between writing and revising a manuscript. A more effective approach is to send your manuscript to someone else for review; a professional editor is particularly helpful. Most journals formally require that all authors review their paper before submission, and you should not avoid this step, even though it takes time; the greater clarity and reduced number of errors will be repaid by faster, more positive peer reviews.  

Writing that is arranged illogically forces readers to create the organization themselves. The standard structure of a journal article provides a useful overall structure, but within each section, you must choose a logical structure for the contents of that section. For example, use chronological order to describe procedures, since anyone who must repeat your procedure must follow that order. Chronological order also works well for literature reviews that describe how a field’s body of knowledge has evolved. For information that describes a chain of thought, causal order is most effective. If phenomenon A causes phenomenon B, which in turn causes phenomenon C, the order should be A, followed by B and then C. This is true even if you performed the research in the order C, B, and A.  

When you present only raw data, you force readers to calculate important values such as the mean and standard deviation. Understanding how readers will use your results tells you what calculations you should report. For example, if your research could help readers determine the appropriate sample size and replication for future studies, ensure that you provide key parameters such as the mean, median, range, standard deviation, standard error, coefficient of variation, and least-significant difference.  

Incorrect literature citations are frustrating, since readers naturally want to find and read the key papers that you cited. Your paper’s References section is important; when you write a literature review, it can be the most important part of the manuscript. Thus, provide complete and correct details for each reference. Adding a DOI or Web address for each reference saves much time, particularly in papers that will be published by journals that are only available in electronic format, since readers can click an address or copy it into their Web browser and immediately find the article. Thus, ensure that your references are correct. Don’t assume that a journal’s editorial staff will do this for you. Often, they won't.  

Each problem that I have described in this article costs the reader time to solve. It’s unethical to take shortcuts that force your readers to do work that you should have done while you were writing and revising your paper. Investing your time to solve a problem for all readers eliminates the need for those readers to waste time solving the problem. For example, it may take a reader only 1 minute to find the correct reference when your citation contains an error. However, if 1000 people read your paper and must each repeat the same search, you’ve wasted 1000 minutes of their time—more than 16 hours. If you don’t describe your methods thoroughly, those same 1000 readers may each spend 1 minute finding a paper that describes those methods in sufficient detail (another 16 hours).

Reducing the length and improving the clarity of your manuscripts is equally essential. If long, unclear writing costs those same 1000 readers 5 minutes re-reading the text until they understand it, you have wasted more than 80 hours of their time.

Worst of all, you may lead other researchers to make errors that compromise their own experiments, thereby requiring repetition of the experiments or introducing errors into the research literature if they don’t detect the flaw in their experimental design and mistakenly believe that their data is reliable. In such cases, your efforts may prevent wasted money, ineffective research, or harm to living beings that could have been avoided.