Why so many research papers are so hard to understand

Wondering why so many research papers are so hard to read? I got some great words of wisdom from Professor Jean-Claude Latombe on the subject back when I was in his research group at Stanford. He described two strategies people employ for getting your paper published in a journal. The first is to do some great research and write the results up in a clear, well-written way.

Sometimes, however, you may invest time in research and end up with not particularly interesting results. If you wrote a paper describing your insignificant research in a clear manner, then your paper would clearly be bad and would be rejected. A strategy to employ in this scenario is to present your research in a complex, non-straightforward manner. Now no one will ever say your paper is great, but people will be less likely to say your paper is flat out bad (after all, it sounds like you were researching something really complex!). So your paper will fall into the middle of the pack which may be good enough to get published.

For an incredibly vivid illustration of this strategy, check out SCIgen, an automatic CS paper generator that got a randomly generated paper accepted into a conference.

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