PB2A

As college students, we often depend on scholarly articles to conduct research, write essays, or even study for tests. Rarely do we ever pay attention to what actually constitutes a scholarly article, however. In an effort to visualize the conventions of scholarly academic publications, I’m going to compare their features and conventions with those of SciGen products.

First of all, let’s revisit one of our beloved genre generators, the SciGen, and recall the conventions of SciGen’s mock research papers. What the generator produced were mock research papers. They seemed pretty legit — with a method section, language that appeared to be formal, research and introduction portions. Basically, if you were in a hurry and skimmed over the mock paper, you would probably not notice that the content is pure nonsense. Yet, if we compare the nonsensical paper that SciGen spewed out with a legitimate scholarly article or peer-reviewed journal, we will still find certain similarities.

Regardless of the content, scientific papers follow a certain format that distinguishes them from other works of writing. For starters, the names of all the people who contributed to the paper always appear at the top of the first page. The use of technical jargon still prevails and the language is very poised and formal, with a serious tone. Both also have introductions, sometimes called abstracts, which briefly describe the topic or experiment discussed in the paper. They are divided into sections or subtopics, with the labels usually determined by what is being discussed in the separated section. It is not uncommon to also find diagrams, drawings, or graphs in both academic publications and SciGen paper generations.

As for the differences, I’ll start with the obvious ones. Scholarly academic publications have legitimate, understandable content that focus on specific topics, such as butterfly distributions depending on climate. Whereas topics for SciGen papers just have a string of big words that make no sense when put together. Another obvious difference is that scholarly articles tend to be much longer, with the content of each subtopic exceeding the two or three paragraph limit that is so often found in the fake science papers.

The intended audience, at least to me, was a bit of a gray area. What I have come to understand is that both works are targeting the audience of people who specifically seek out scientific articles. Legit scholarly articles would, in my opinion, would deviate a bit because although they target a larger group of people who are looking for an unambiguous piece of writing, the access to them is limited compared to the general public since to read certain articles, one must access them though either a university portal, or have some other key. As for SciGen, all one needs to do, regardless of affiliation, would be to simply type in the website and generate a paper.

Another big difference between the two that I could not miss was that they had different purposes. While the role of academic publications was to inform students and assist them with research or whatnot, the only clear role for SciGen’s fake papers that I could distinguish was to show people how a scientific research paper might look like.

The aspects of the scholarly piece that struck me as most important were the intended audience and content of the paper. They are way more specific than SciGen’s. The piece is informative and targets a crowd of people who knew what topic they were looking for prior to finding the scholarly piece. I think those two aspects are probably the most important ones (at least to me) because when I search for scholarly articles, I prefer them to have as much info on the needed topic as possible so that I wouldn’t have to search for other ones. For example, when I looked up “butterflies and their environment” in the Academic Search complete, the result was pretty close to what I was looking for.

That’s what makes scholarly pieces important for me.