Ask HN: Any nerds out there who've read a lot of research papers? Which are the most memorable abstracts you have read? I know I am a jackass who usually vibecodes my way through assignments but even I don't want to write a cookie-cutter intro for my paper. I wanna write something that stays with the reader. What paper has stuck with you, what made it memorable? |
Smith, Gordon C. S., and Jill P. Pell. 2003. “Parachute Use to Prevent Death and Major Trauma Related to Gravitational Challenge: Systematic Review of Randomised Controlled Trials.” BMJ 327 (7429): 1459–61. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.327.7429.1459.
Objectives: To determine whether parachutes are effective in preventing major trauma related to gravitational challenge.
Design: Systematic review of randomised controlled trials.
Data sources: Medline, Web of Science, Embase, and the Cochrane Library databases; appropriate internet sites and citation lists.
Study selection: Studies showing the effects of using a parachute during free fall.
Main outcome measure: Death or major trauma, defined as an injury severity score > 15.
Results: We were unable to identify any randomised controlled trials of parachute intervention.
Conclusions: As with many interventions intended to prevent ill health, the effectiveness of parachutes has not been subjected to rigorous evaluation by using randomised controlled trials. Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute.
Some titles stick. "Attention is all you need". "SSA is functional programming". Plus more people see the title than read the abstract. Only one I got to name myself was "Shared Memory Remote Procedure Calls" which I now realise is in exactly the same theme of given the title, you don't need the abstract or the contents.
There's also the infamous opening paragraph to the "States of Matter" textbook by David L. Goodstein:
Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.
Short, succinct and no AI in sight.
include a SUMMARIUM in Latin and ΣΥΝΟΨΙΣ in Greek, for that real Scholar effect.
IMO the most memorable papers contain some unexpected simplification: a complicated problem turns out to reduce to something much simpler [0], perhaps for a counterintuitive reason [1].
So a memorable abstract should advertise that the paper contains some cute little trick. This may not help you actually publish though
[0]: Attack the RLHF problem with a simple classification loss: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18290
[1]: Frustratingly Easy Meta-Embeddings: https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.05262
For example, I quite enjoyed the paper “Web Browser Fingerprinting Using Only Cascading Style Sheets,” but its abstract isn’t anything overly exciting. The title itself conveyed enough information for me to gather my interest, its attract just confirmed it was probably worth reading it.
"Abstract The Paxos algorithm, when presented in plain English, is very simple."