Towards Agile Academia: An Approach to Scientific Paper Writing Inspired by Software Engineering

<p>The construction of scientific papers is performed in service of the greater scientific community. This iterative process is, in effect, an academic economy, where all members benefit from well-written papers. However, many published scientific papers are poorly written; they often lack sufficient detail to allow replication, there is improper usage of citations or a lack of regard to relevant work, reporting is vague or without linked empirical data to allow verification, figures do not correspond to text or are non-sensical, literary elements, e.g., bulleted lists, are used ineffectively, formatting renders certain sections unreadable, and grammatical errors abound. The issues of paper quality are widespread and of varying concern. Similarly, the development of software systems is rife with many processual issues, from high-level architectural flaws to small developer errors, e.g., setting a Boolean value to true instead of false, which can be disastrous in large systems. As an answer to these longstanding concerns, software development methods have emerged over decades, most notably, the Waterfall and Agile approaches. These methods have established software engineering as a professional discipline backed by rigorous, empirical evaluation on many systems. A scientific paper is, conceptually, a system to be developed, much like a software system: it has a name, particular sections codified for different purposes, e.g., as the abstract summarizes and the conclusion concludes, it has an author or authors, it goes through several iterations of refinement, it may reference outside systems and it is eventually released to the public, and possibly maintained in future versions. It is posited that, due to the relatively small nature of most scientific papers (4-20 pages), the Agile method of software development can be used to produce more reliable scientific papers, in a more efficient manner and with better availability to readers, by employing the principles of open-source software, and a version control system, e.g., Git. Agile methods consistently provide deliverables of higher quality; this work intends to demonstrate that Agile can be adapted to streamline the scientific writing process and improve publication quality.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Software Engineering

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis - Open Access

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Electrical, Computer, Software, and Systems Engineering

Year

2023

Author dc:creator

• Procko, Tyler

• agile
• software engineering
• research
• metascience
• process development
• scientific writing
• Computer Engineering
• Linguistics
• Management Information Systems
• Publishing
• Scholarly Communication
• Scholarly Publishing
• Strategic Management Policy
• Systems Engineering
• Systems Science

Repository record dc:identifier

https://commons.erau.edu/edt/784

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:commons.erau.edu:edt-1814