Revisiting: The best-written scientific paper you have read

My understanding of best-written scientific paper is a few years old and may have been superseded. If it has been, I would genuinely like to know rather than keep repeating it.

The claim about best-written scientific paper upthread is stronger than its source supports. I have read the source. The source says "associated with" and the post says "causes".

A digression that keeps occurring to me: the most-linked documents here are the dullest ones. Nothing gets cited like the unit-arithmetic page.

That has been true for the cases I have seen and I have not seen many.

An observation about best-written scientific paper that I cannot explain and am posting anyway, on the principle that unexplained observations are more useful public than private.

Right — I had this wrong and I am glad to have read it before it mattered.

The arithmetic on best-written scientific paper is the easy part and it is where the errors are, which is an uncomfortable combination. Show your working and someone will catch it.

Something I have wondered without ever asking: is there a good reason the vocabulary in this field is so inconsistent between suppliers? Half the disagreements here start as terminology.

Noted, and thank you for writing it out rather than summarising it.

Since best-written scientific paper keeps coming up, it should probably be a maintained page rather than a recurring thread. I am happy to draft it if someone with more direct experience will review it.

Lounge question, no agenda: does anyone else keep a physical notebook for this rather than a file? Mine is more use than anything I have typed, and I cannot entirely explain why.

Where I would look next, rather than where I would stop.

Counterpoint on best-written scientific paper, offered without confidence: the same observation is consistent with a much duller explanation, and nobody has ruled the dull one out.

On best-written scientific paper I would separate what is worth knowing from what is worth acting on. The first list is long and the second is short, and conflating them is how threads get heated.

Agreed, and the corollary is that a place with no visible corrections is not a place with fewer errors.

Checked the best-written scientific paper claim against the primary source this morning. It survives, with a narrower scope than the version quoted here. Posting the narrower scope.

Agreed on all of that, and I have nothing to add to it.

I read the earlier replies on best-written scientific paper twice before writing this, because I had assumed the opposite and wanted to be sure I was disagreeing with what was said rather than what I expected.