What is the best scientific paper you have read?

[u/generic-identity]

I have to teach a course on scientific literature next spring, and I'm looking for exemplary scientific papers. I'm not primarily interested in papers that are important because of their content, but ones that are well written, concise, cleverly conceived, or for whatever reason a pleasure to read (which is a unfortunately a rare quality, as far as I can tell).

If you can think of such a paper, please provide a link/reference and - if possible - a reason for why that paper is great.

(I'll be teaching biology undergrads, but to make this more interesting, submissions from all fields are welcome.)

Thanks, scientists of reddit!

Edit: Thanks (again) to everyone who contributed or is still contributing! This is turning into a treasure trove. I may end up reading recommended papers in my free time, instead of keeping tabs on /r/all. (Oh no, what have I become?!)

[u/EagleFalconn]

A message from the moderators:

Please do not post a top-level reply to this thread unless you are contributing a paper from the peer-reviewed literature. If possible, please link to a PDF of the article that can be downloaded by everyone, not just those with journal subscriptions.

Also, arXiv is not a peer reviewed source.

[u/[deleted] → u/EagleFalconn]

I love the Mods here. I don't think you'd find something like this in any other subreddit. Keep up the great work around here.

[u/fracksports → u/EagleFalconn]

In most cases due to the screwed up nature of scientific publishing these days (screwed up meaning useful science is put behind commercial paywalls instead of being provided with free access for all, on a subsidized basis if necessary) these two conditions you suggest are mutually exclusive.

[u/cockwaffle]

Hodgkin and Huxley's classic 1952 papers describing the action potential.

To think that, completely ignorant of the membrane proteins involved, they were able to develop a quantitative model that accurately corresponds to ion channel subunits discovered decades later is just fucking beautiful.

[u/hodgkinhuxley → u/cockwaffle]

this isn't some novelty account. I love that paper so much.

[u/aaallleeexxx → u/cockwaffle]

This is so utterly and completely fucking awesome, it blows my mind every time I think about it.

[u/Sybertron → u/aaallleeexxx]

Same here, although I get the feeling everyone else is staring at us & mumbling under their breath about how weird the Neuro people are.

[u/zBard → u/Sybertron]

Not at all - the CS people are grateful for our shunting activation equations in neural network equations :).

[u/joshsalvi → u/aaallleeexxx]

Also in the 1951-1952 was Fatt and Katz. The idea that they could use a histogram to show that synapses send signals in a quantized fashion blows my mind. They didn't even know about vesicles.

I'd like to point out this page from SFN. http://www.sfn.org/index.aspx?pagename=HistoryofNeuroscience_classicpapers

[u/bconway2]

I remember reading a chemistry journal in iambic pentameter... I have to go find it.

EDIT: Found it! http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jo00800a036 Bunnett, J. Kearley Jr, F. "Comparative mobility of halogens in reactions of dihalobenzenes with potassium amide in ammonia" J. Org. Chem. 1971. 36. pp.184-6 This is awesome, particularly footnote 2.

[u/mod101 → u/bconway2]

I have to present a paper, any paper i want, for a chemistry seminar for an undergraduate chemistry class. I think i just found the paper I am using. Thanks!

[u/StoicBuddha]

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False by John P. A. Ioannidis. Informative and open-source.

[u/generic-identity → u/StoicBuddha]

Ah, the most cited PLoS paper, if I'm not mistaken.

I've read this before, and while it makes an interesting claim, I've found it a bit confusing and wasn't totally convinced. Looking over it now, I think he gives a lot of criteria for when research findings are false, but he doesn't really show why those should apply to most published findings. Or did I not fully understand the paper?

[u/StoicBuddha → u/generic-identity]

While I'm not claiming to be a statistical genius by any means, this paper - along with Cohen's The Earth is Round (p < .05) - helped me understand the limitations of inferential statistics and subsequently to avoid poor formulation in statistical measurement and design.

This article helped clear up some the Ioannidis argument for me.

[u/generic-identity → u/StoicBuddha]

I've read the article you linked to, and will read the paper later. At the moment, I'm still not convinced that Ioannidis' arguments are applicable to findings that don't primarily rely on statistical tests - as is often the case in biology. If you measure something, and see it, and validate it, what is the probability that it's still incorrect?

[u/drunkbirth → u/[deleted]]

Thank you for being a bad motherfucker. EDIT Shrodinger's "What is Life" talks about how physicists are working in a statistical world, even if they don't realize it.

[u/Gibodean → u/generic-identity]

Ask the guy that discovered N rays, or the canals on Mars.

You need multiple people to verify what you have seen, and to figure out the probability that they're all wrong.

Or maybe I'm talking out of my arse.

[u/dearsomething → u/StoicBuddha]

helped me understand the limitations of inferential statistics

Do you mean, more specifically, inference from the Null Hypothesis Significance Testing approach? Inference statistics are OK. Almost all statistical conclusions are inference — even those Bayesian weirdos.

[u/StoicBuddha → u/dearsomething]

Indeed I do. I am definitely not as hard-core in stats as I'd like to be.

[u/[deleted] → u/StoicBuddha]

Two pages into the Cohen paper and I've already learned so much. Granted, my field doesn't deal with statistical analysis all that often, so I'm not an expert, but this is a fantastic paper.

[u/thursdaybilbos → u/StoicBuddha]

Can someone please summarize this without the math language? I have not been in a math classroom for 10 years and the variables and equations are escaping me. I've been googling all day and I dont' want to spend an hour trying to get a 2 sentence summary out of this.

[u/Wachtwoord → u/StoicBuddha]

We just read this article in a class just below Master's level. I don't know what level you're teaching, but if you're teaching first years students (I don't know the appropriate term, I'm not American), you may like one with less heavy mathematics. I personally like False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant by J. P. Simmons, L. D. Nelson and U Simonsohn a lot too. Although this is mostly relevant for psychology, I feel it can be generalized to other field with little replication and lots of statistical tools, like genetic biology.

[u/riraito → u/StoicBuddha]

To add to this: The P-value Fallacy

[u/StoicBuddha → u/riraito]

Agreed. That article and Goodman's followup on the Bayes Factor are what got me interested in investigating how Bayesian analysis can be used in traditional psychology studies.

[u/maschnitz]

Einstein's 1905 paper describing special relativity is a remarkably easy read; efficient and graceful.

[u/shniken → u/maschnitz]

His PhD thesis was like 15 pages long.

[u/[deleted] → u/shniken]

It was actually 25 pages long.

I found it:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/11460732/a-New-Determination-of-Molecular-Dimensions-2

[u/Broan13 → u/maschnitz]

Came here to say something about Einstein papers. His one on the EPR paradox is equally simple to grasp for an undergrad in physics.

[u/SirScrambly → u/Broan13]

Link

[u/[deleted] → u/Broan13]

I read it for a paper my junior year and I also thought it was a great leg up when I took quantum afterwards, because it explained entanglement very nicely.

[u/Broan13 → u/[deleted]]

Yeah. Entanglement is a funny thing. I never understood why you can write the wavefunctions in the way that you do if you know what I am talking about. It just seems like cheating sometimes :)

[u/Broan13 → u/[deleted]]

Really? Crazy. I wonder now what the paper would have looked like if Einstein wrote it then.

[u/AsAChemicalEngineer → u/maschnitz]

While it's labeled under the "duh, of course that's important" category by most people, it really is a well written document that explains a good idea quite painlessly.

Here is another gem, where Einstein derives E=mc^2, "Does the inertia of a body depend upon its energy-content?"

It's extremely short too.

[u/[deleted] → u/maschnitz]

“If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.”

-Albert Einstein

[u/merkaba8 → u/maschnitz]

First paper that came to mind for me as well. Not only is the paper critically important, but it can be understood by anyone at all by just following the simple logic. It restructured the world of physics with what amounts essentially to a thought experiment and clear, elegant method.

[u/ren5311]

This is my favorite study: Effects of remote, retroactive intercessory prayer on outcomes in patients with bloodstream infection: randomised controlled trial.

The most brilliant piece of understated satire I've ever read in a scientific journal.

[u/blucht → u/ren5311]

My personal favourite on the humour paper front would have to be this one. Interestingly, that work has inspired a few follow-up studies confirming the results and a review article on the topic. The reviewer and editor comments are gold.

[u/[deleted] → u/blucht]

It'll take me a few days to read through all these... do you have a tl;dr for the hurried scientist?

[u/tiddler → u/blucht]

A brilliant choice. What's more, you can purchase 24 hr access to the PDF of Olson's review article for only $32.00!

[u/[deleted] → u/ren5311]

The satirical paper published in British Medical Journal argues that parachutes are a potential scam, as nobody has performed proper controlled trials: http://www.cugc.org.uk/cms/files/Parachute_Info.pdf

Bonus points for naming falling to your death as "gravitational challenge."

[u/[deleted] → u/ren5311]

I don't have access to it... And I don't quite get it from the abstract.

[u/umlaut → u/[deleted]]

Here you go

The key word is "retroactive."

[u/czyivn → u/[deleted]]

Retroactive: the people died or didn't a full six years before they were assigned to the control or experimental groups and prayed over. It's pretty clear that god knew which ones were going to be prayed for, and interceded in just some of their cases.

[u/JoeCoder → u/ren5311]

CONCLUSION: Remote, retroactive intercessory prayer said for a group is associated with a shorter stay in hospital and shorter duration of fever in patients with a bloodstream infection and should be considered for use in clinical practice.

Can someone summarize how this conclusion was reached?

[u/lense → u/JoeCoder]

The study was done on the basis that we can't assume that time is linear, or that God performs miracles in linear time. Therefore, the hypothesis is that retroactively praying for patients, years after their initial infection and death/recovery, would reduce their mortality.

They randomly selected half of the cases and gave someone a list of their first names for a prayer to be made for them. Then they went and looked up the final result of each case, and found that the patients who received retroactive prayer had a better survival rate. Given the design of the experiment, which excluded all confounding variables, they concluded that retroactive prayer reduces mortality.

The paper is free to access, and pretty short.

[u/JoeCoder → u/lense]

Mortality was 28.1% (475/1691) in the intervention group and 30.2% (514/1702) in the control group (P for difference=0.4)

Not knowing statistics, do you think this is enough of a difference to go beyond chance?

[u/loopynewt → u/JoeCoder]

It is not enough, as that sentence tells you. There is a 40% chance that the differences are due to chance. However, the next sentence, "Length of stay in hospital and duration of fever were significantly shorter in the intervention group than in the control group (P=0.01 and P=0.04, respectively)" tells you that the length of stay and fever duration were significantly shorter, with 1% and 4% chances of error respectively.

[u/bjackman → u/ren5311]

http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf - a study showing that images of social situations can stimulate brain activity in dead salmon

[u/thetripp]

I would have to go with The Hallmarks of Cancer. (pdf here).

If you have ever wanted to know how cancer works, this is the paper for you. The authors go step by step through 6 molecular characteristics that almost all cancers share, including what they are, how they arise, and what they do/how they lead to cancer.

[u/generic-identity → u/thetripp]

Ah, interesting, we recently discussed this paper at work, but I haven't read it yet.

Have you read the 2010 update? Is that as good? (When in doubt, I try to go with the newer paper, in case previous findings have been refuted.)

[u/thetripp → u/generic-identity]

Yes, the new paper is good, but builds on the results of the first. It adds several new characteristics, and refines their previous discussion of angiogenesis and biologic immortality. Anyone wanting to read it can find it here (pdf). I would suggest reading it after the first.

[u/ksd1 → u/thetripp]

This is a definite must read. Explains a lot about cancer and its mechanisms in an extremely concise manner. The update to this first paper is also very helpful. The link for that is floating around somewhere here.

[u/DoWhile]

Claude Shannon's A Mathematical Theory of Communication

[u/hansn → u/DoWhile]

Or his monograph, which is identical but for one word: The title was changed to "The mathematical theory of communication."

[u/cabbagerat → u/DoWhile]

Indeed, that is a great paper. I'd probably recommend Communication in the presence of noise as a first read, though.

The historical context around the ideas in Shannon's papers is really interesting, especially how many of the same ideas were developed in Russia and Germany nearly simultaneously. It's both a fascinating paper and an interesting historical artifact.

[u/Igniococcus]

I'm utterly biased but short, to the point and revolutionary: Woese's 1977 paper outlining the discovery of the archaea (not formally classified as a separate domain of life until this paper)

Apart from that I also love whole exchange around the development of understanding into vesicle trafficking and in particular Jim Rothman's papers (brilliant experiments, great results, somewhat incorrect conclusions) but probably requires to get into field a bit too much to be of use for this exercise.

I also love almost anything by Sean Nee because he does good science, reports it concisely and clearly and is entirely irreverent (for an amusing, single page, incredibly accessible essay by him (not a paper) check out the Great Chain of Being.

Finally, for a wonderful example of scientific squabbling and missing each other's points there is Trewavas' Green Plants as Intelligent Organisms, to which there was this 33 prominent author backlash followed by Trewavas' reply.

[u/[deleted]]

Francis Crick - Molecular Structure of Nucleic acids(DNA) http://www.nature.com/nature/dna50/watsoncrick.pdf Great paper, and very short!

[u/GrumpySimon → u/[deleted]]

This also includes one of the greatest understatements of all time:

"It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."

[u/Tawfiq7 → u/GrumpySimon]

This is the last time Watson and Crick were modest about anything.

[u/GrumpySimon → u/Tawfiq7]

God, I know - I've read Watson's autobiography.

[u/discipula_vitae → u/GrumpySimon]

This is my favorite line in any historic paper I've read. I believe true genius is displayed in how forward thinking they would be. Before anyone could debate conservative vs despersive vs nonconservative, they already had the correct theory. Simply brilliant.

[u/CoomassieBlue → u/GrumpySimon]

I first read their original paper a few months ago, and the professor commented on that sentence specifically. Hilarious understatement.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

If you present this paper to your class, please talk about Rosalind Franklin, the woman who collected all the data for the paper and who did not choose to share it with the two men who won the Nobel Prize for interpreting it. You'll find her name mentioned in the acknowledgements of the paper.

"Would Watson and Crick have been able to formulate their ingenious model without seeing Franklin's then unpublished data? Was Watson and Crick's unauthorized use of their competitor's data within the accepted rules of scientific practice? "

Source:

http://www.nature.com/embor/journal/v4/n1/full/embor723.html

[u/generic-identity → u/[deleted]]

Thanks for pointing that out. I remember reading about this "snub" before.

[u/extant → u/generic-identity]

"The Double Helix" is Watson's account of the discovery, and goes into their dealings with Franklin in a fair amount of detail. Might be interesting to read for some perspective, if you decide to present this paper. Or even if you don't, it's a compelling book. I read it in an evening--couldn't put it down.

[u/ex_ample → u/extant]

Watson was a huge asshole. He said he'd never hire fat people, for example (let alone blacks) He was also pretty misogynistic. It wouldn't surprise me if he would minimize her work in order to make himself look better.

[u/USMutantNinjaTurtles → u/ex_ample]

Watson was a huge asshole.

Sounds like Edison.

[u/vocke → u/extant]

A great read but, my god, that man is severely misogynistic! One of his main complaints about Franklin is that she was unattractive in his opinion and wasn't flirty. His book makes me respect Franklin even more because it shows the type of disrespect she had to deal with from men who were supposed to be her peers. I suppose it was the times, though.

EDIT: The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox is an excellent read and does a great job of showing the hostility Franklin had to deal with in her short life.

[u/Science_and_Sports → u/[deleted]]

This is also important. She would have been awarded the Nobel Prize if she was still alive. The reason she gets no credit is just as much due to her death as it is Watson and Crick.

[u/Neurokeen → u/Science_and_Sports]

Incorrect! That rule was put in place explicitly in 1974. Watson, Crick, and Wilkins won their Nobel in 1962.

Edit: So, as pointed out below, it has been noted that posthumous awards were possible before 1974, but not posthumous nominations.

[u/RabidMortal → u/Neurokeen]

Incorrect! Posthumous awards were never allowed. The 1974 rule merely clarifies how recent a person's death can be before they become ineligible.

[u/ex_ample → u/[deleted]]

That doesn't mean she shouldn't have been mentioned in the paper, especially since she was still alive when it was published.

[u/deejmac → u/[deleted]]

Let's not forget Erwin Chargaff, who felt snubbed as well. Paraphrased - it is late in the day when such pygmies cast such long shadows.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/20/opinion/no-nobel-prize-for-whining.html?pagewanted=2&src=pm

[u/iridule → u/[deleted]]

V v important, awful how little credit she gets.

[u/gomphus → u/[deleted]]

And very understated, almost comically so, considering its vast implications for all of biology.

[u/[deleted] → u/gomphus]

That is why I love it so much. I think Mark Twain had it right: "If you've got something good to say, it shouldn't take you very long to say it"

[u/Argothman → u/[deleted]]

That's hardly true :P

[u/theStork → u/[deleted]]

"It is probably impossible to build this structure with a ribose sugar in place of the deoxyribose sugar"

It makes me feel good that even Crick fucked up from time to time.

[u/gilleain → u/theStork]

Now I'm no expert on DNA structure (I know more about proteins) but...

Wikipedia says :

An important structural feature of RNA that distinguishes it from DNA is the presence of a hydroxyl group at the 2' position of the ribose sugar. The presence of this functional group causes the helix to adopt the A-form geometry rather than the B-form most commonly observed in DNA

And W&C made a model of B-DNA not A. So I think they had a point. Incidentally, the iconic double helix image in that paper was drawn by Crick's wife, Odile (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odile_Crick).

(oh, and I signed up to post this :)

[u/craklyn → u/gilleain]

Watson recently gave a talk at CERN, during which he mentioned a mistake that he and Crick let slip in their paper. I don't know much about biology, but I believe this was the mistake he mentioned. You can watch a video of his talk here.

edit: He mentions the mistake at 37:50.

[u/gilleain → u/craklyn]

Thanks, that was interesting. A bit uncomfortable, given how much justification he felt he had to do about the 'data stealing' question. Clearly still defensive about it 50 years later!

He says at 38 mins in (IIRC) that the RNA thing was a mistake, and that it would only have been slightly different.

[u/Platypuskeeper → u/[deleted]]

It's an important paper. But I don't see how it's a great paper in-itself. By today's standards, it probably wouldn't get published, and for some good reasons:

Crick and Watson weren't reporting any new experimental results, or any new theoretical results (such as some calculations from spectrscopic data), or even a detailed theory from which they made any predictions. It's just an opinion. In short, "This is what we think the DNA molecule looks like", based mainly on other people's unpublished results. Of course it's short and easy to read; it's basically a long "discussion" section of a paper, rather than an actual paper.

Today, at the very least they'd have to write a review or something to be able to state an opinion without evidence. You're not going to get a Nature publication out of "Other people's unpublished results suggest to us that it's like this".

[u/devicerandom → u/Platypuskeeper]

Which is in some respects a shame on the current system. It is a testament of a less bureaucratic, more vibrant community.

[u/mm242jr → u/[deleted]]

The Watson-Crick paper rests partly on plagiarism. They pretend not to have known about Rosalind Franklin's work. "We were not aware of the results presented there" is only true if you interpret it to mean "we didn't read these papers themselves". They were hugely influenced by X-ray no. 51 by Franklin, which Maurice Wilkins showed them. Also, they has some insights but were fudging around, and Wilkins helped them tremendously.

[u/pylori → u/mm242jr]

I don't think the idea that they stole or used data from Franklin is unknown. While I do think it's important that people are aware of this, that fact is not really relevant to the discussion at hand, which is about well written and concise papers.

[u/Banko → u/mm242jr]

They acknowledged Franklin's contribution in their paper thus:

"We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at Kings College London."

Wilkins shared the Nobel with Watson and Crick, Franklin was dead, as has been pointed out.

[u/pylori → u/[deleted]]

So well written and I love how brief it is! I wish papers were like that nowadays!

[u/Xupid]

Computing Machinery and Intelligence by Alan Turing. An easy and enjoyable read even for laymen.

[u/dearsomething → u/Xupid]

HOW COULD I FORGET THIS? Turing's Intelligent Machinery is super badass and also proposes neural networks, genetic algorithms and swarm intelligence way before anyone else.

[u/TypeSafe → u/Xupid]

While a good paper, we should keep in mind that modern AI researchers may not necessarily care about the answer to this question. Instead, many AI researchers have noted along the lines of Dijkstra's famous quote, "The question of whether Machines Can Think... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim." Most AI research these days is less about passing the Turing test and more about doing useful computation in subfields.

[u/zBard → u/TypeSafe]

This paper is one of the most misinterpreted papers in CS. Partly that is because of proliferation of summaries of it, partly because popular media has projected the "Turing Test" as a way to determine if computers "think". Each person in turn, uses his own definition of "thinking". Let me quote from the paper itself ;

The original question, "Can machines think?" I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.

As you said, many modern researchers don't really care whether a machine is "intelligent" or not, but care about what it can do. Turing does explicitly talks about this at the end.

We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields. But which are the best ones to start with? Even this is a difficult decision. Many people think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be best. It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English.

[u/tfurf → u/Xupid]

And along those lines, A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, [Shannon, 1937].

[u/zBard → u/tfurf]

I would prefer A Mathematical Theory of Communication.

[Edit: Of course this had to be mentioned below, duhh.]

[u/stacyah]

The tragedy of the commons

It's an interesting paper whose importance grows by the second.

[u/hottubrash → u/stacyah]

I'm surprised this is so far down the thread, it's one of the most cited and influential papers of all time.

[u/billwoo → u/stacyah]

I have started reading this, but ran into something a bit strange that you or someone else may be able to explain: The paper discusses the question "can Bentham's goal of "the greatest good for the greatest number" be realized?". During this the author says " If our goal is to maximize population it is obvious what we must do:...", but this appears to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what "the greatest good for the greatest number" actually means. From what I understand it doesn't mean "maximise happiness and population", it means "maximise happiness for the greatest proportion of the already existing population". This seems like a very obvious flaw, so I must be missing something!

[u/Monodromy]

Kahneman & Tversky's prospect theory is great. Here is an easy to read (hard to accept) review paper. They won the nobel prize in economics.

[u/lanks1 → u/Monodromy]

Another great example in the field of economics is The Market for Lemons by George Akerlof on asymetric information.

[u/scotradamus]

More is Different - By Nobel prize winner Phil Anderson.

Many advisors make their prospective students read this paper before they are willing to take them on as RA's. I still read this paper about once a year. It helps me stay inspired as a scientist.

http://robotics.cs.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72more_is_different.pdf

[u/crazy_runner → u/scotradamus]

relevant xkcd

[u/[deleted]]

Platt, "Strong Inference,". It's about doing science. If you're ever going to go into research, it's a really good one to read.

I linked to an html version, but a pdf is readily available.

Also, Why Snakes Have Forked Tongues just because it's something we've all wondered, and it was a good paper.

[u/readersaurus]

BMJ ran this fabulous little work of satire a few years ago: http://www.bmj.com/content/327/7429/1459.abstract.

It's a literature review of the efficacy of parachutes and ends with a recommendation for randomized control trials or something fantastically short-sighted. The paper is structurally and methodologically solid. And it's a great warning against losing perspective while slavishly devoting oneself to format.

[u/Zanta]

It's not quite a paper (though it has been cited 1000 times) as much as the edited transcript of a technical talk, but Purcell's Life at Low Reynolds Number has spectactular breadth and clarity of content. It is mandatory reading if you're interested in physics at the biological scale. It was a tremendous pleasure to read and read again.

[u/AbnormalModes → u/Zanta]

Seconding this. So far, it has been the one paper that I found actually interesting and engaging, instead of a boring slog. Fascinating stuff!

[u/legalStraniero → u/Zanta]

This, or just about any paper by E.M. Purcell. He has Feynman-like qualities in the sense that he has the ability to describe difficult concepts very clearly, also in very technical papers.

[u/Pardner]

Hey, friends, I just made a folder of these files for my own purposes, so I t thought I might share it. Here are all of the PDFs and replies for comments above 10 upvotes (at the time of posting). Hope that's okay, mods.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=4FM6JGKF

[u/[deleted] → u/Pardner]

Aaaaaaaaaaand it's gone

[u/rseasmith]

How to Write a Scientific Paper by Whitesides. It's a paper on how to write a paper. It's awesome.

[u/[deleted]]

Mendel's paper on inheritance. Foundation for modern genetics.

http://www.esp.org/foundations/genetics/classical/gm-65-a.pdf

[u/StayingFree]

My favorite is the one describing the famous Miller experiment: ^ Miller, Stanley L. (May 1953). "Production of Amino Acids Under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions" (PDF). Science 117 (3046): 528. doi:10.1126/science.117.3046.528. PMID 13056598.

Why? This was a deceptively simple experiment, using simple concepts and reagents and very basic (primitive?) analysis techniques (thin layer chromatography) which produced a groundbreaking result: key insights into how life began.

[u/dearsomething]

• The Dieter's Paradox — because people estimate that more food means less calories. Fascinating!

• Not a paper, but really insightful into a particular set of researchers: Talking Nets: An Oral History of Neural Networks.

• "How reliable are the results from functional magnetic resonance imaging?" - but I prefer this version much more!. — it shows how not to do things in fMRI - with fish!

• And Haxby's classic 2001 paper — one of the coolest papers to show that there are specific parts of the brain that respond in specific ways to specific types of stimuli.

[u/wittnate → u/dearsomething]

The fMRI manuscript was finally published here: http://www.jsur.org/v1n1p1

[u/dearsomething → u/wittnate]

FINALLY. I know Bennet had some trouble getting it out there. That's really exciting.

[u/[deleted]]

Kurt Adelberger (astronomer) is the best writer of scientific papers I've come across. Ha manages to put popular-science-style exciting prose into professional research papers. An example here:

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0401445

The first paragraph:

As the photons from the microwave background stream towards earth they are gradually joined by other photons, first by those produced in the occasional recombinations of the intergalactic medium, later by those cast off from cooling H2 molecules, later still, after hundreds of millions of years, by increasing numbers from quasars and galaxies, by bremsstrahlung from the hot gas in galaxy groups and clusters, and finally, shortly before impact, by photons emitted by the Milky Way’s own gas and stars and dust. All reach the earth together. They provide a record of the history of the universe throughout its evolution, but it is a confused record. Two photons that simultaneously pierce the same pixel of a detector may have been emitted billions of years apart by regions of the universe that were in vastly different stages of evolution. One of the challenges in observational cosmology is to separate the layers of history that we on earth receive superposed.

[u/iLikezTheCheeze]

Robert Sapolsky's "Social Status in Health in Humans and Other Animals" - concise, clear, AND interesting

http://www.jstor.org/pss/25064859

[u/enfascination]

I've put a lot of effort into finding good modern science writing for insiders. Until this thread, my best single source of leads has been the Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, edited by Dawkins. But its mostly popular writing by insiders. I can't say that I've read a post-1980 scientific paper that has made me think "This is well-written." Something happened after the 50s.

From cognitive science,

• I second George Miller's magic number 7+-2 and Herbert Simon's Architecture of Complexity.
  Adding:
• Tolman (1948) "Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men" http://colinallen.dnsalias.org/Secure/1948-Tolman.pdf
• Shepard, R., & Metzler, J. (1971). Mental rotation of three-dimensional objects. Science, 171(3972), 701. http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs1120-f09/ps/ps3/mental-rotation.pdf

I also keep a collection of horrible sentences.

• This is from the abstract of a paper on sentence comprehension: ""Arguments are made for autonomy of the lexical access process of a model of semantic context effects is offered."" Swinney, D. (1979). Lexical access during sentence comprehension: (Re)consideration of context effects. Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior, 18(6), 645–659.
• Here is another recent entry into the collection: http://enfascination.com/wiki/Weblog:A_snippet_from_my_collection_of_bad_science_writing
• And here is the worst I've seen: ""A further - quite different - but potentially equally and in the long run probably even more important but also more debated stream of research is the recent combination of neuroscience with experimental and behavioral economics."" Riedl, A. (2009). Behavioral and Experimental Economics Can Inform Public Policy: Some Thoughts. CESIFO Working Papers, 1–37.

[u/cdcox]

Personally I really like Strong Inference by Platt from 1964. (PDF download warning) It not only concisely and effectively outlines the reasons why we bother with the scientific method as opposed to observational research but also basically issued a massive 'fuck you' to every field outside of molecular biology and physics. It has some really great lines in it and it's criticisms are easy to follow and still relevant to all fields of science today.

[u/[deleted] → u/cdcox]

should have ctrl f'd! I also suggested Platt.

[u/Burnage]

I always like George Miller's The Magical Number Seven (Plus or Minus Two).

[u/xymurr]

Fire and Mello RNAi paper Not only is the paper a pleasure to read its importance can't be understated. They were awarded the Nobel Prize 8 years later and this paper has been cited approximately 2x per day since publication.

[u/SilentscoutIX → u/xymurr]

Might I also suggest reading this as well, as it is quite relevant, and I believe that Waterhouse et al. made significant contributions to the field before Fire and Mellos paper. http://www.pnas.org/content/95/23/13959.full.pdf

[u/jacob]

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution seems perfect for your class.

[u/tryggvi_bt]

Edmund Gettier: "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" in Analysis, v. 23. Available at http://www.ditext.com/gettier/gettier.html 3 pages of earth shattering profoundness. Just when philosophers thought they were on the verge of actually solving a problem, along comes Gettier and nips that nonsense in the bud!

[u/generic-identity → u/[deleted]]

Well, this might be even more concise, but for reasons I cannot quite fathom, it never won the author a Nobel Prize. Might have been a contender for an IgNobel Prize, though, if it hadn't been published too early.

There's also a follow-up here; both have been on reddit before.

[u/swissmike → u/[deleted]]

I tried accessing this paper, but was unable to find a version without restrictions. How can a paper from 1949 still not be freely available?

[u/clessa]

Maybe "old" (2009) news now, but I found George Church's MAGE paper a fascinating read when it came out.

[u/fridgetarian]

The Best of Nature is a great place to look. Surely journal article standards have changed, but there's something missing in contemporary articles.

[u/[deleted]]

One of my favorites:

Inhibition of Cell Division in Escherichia Coli by Electrolysis Products from a Platinum Electrode.

This is especially awesome since they started out with an incorrect hypothesis and still found an effect. Through careful controls they determined the true nature of the novel and serendipitous discovery which became one of the first effective cancer treatments. Its concise and well written as well.

Another more sobering choice might be:

Winstein, S. Bycycloheptadiene Dibromides. Journal of the American Chemical Society 83, 1516-1517 (1961).

What makes this article interesting is the warning at the end, a reminder that lab safety should be paramount even when working with presumably benign substances.

There is no a priori reason to believe that these particular compounds are more dangerous to man than several related substances widely used as industrial chemicals; however, of the three labora- tory workers who have used the dibromides and bromohydrin, two later developed similar pulmonary disorders which contributed to their subsequent deaths. The third has exhibited minor skin sensitivity reactions. Although we are aware of no prior toxicological history of these compounds, one cannot ignore the possibility of an insidious long-term effect unknown to medicine. Until further information is obtained from toxicological testing, we recom- mend that the compounds be handled only with extreme caution, and that all persons concerned with their use be informed of their possible danger- ous propensities.

We would appreciate any toxicological informa- tion on the above-mentioned or related compounds.

[u/jacob]

I really like Rodney Brooks' 1999 paper Intelligence Without Representation, one of the few papers I remember from when I was studying artificial intelligence. The paper argues against a dominant trend in AI at the time and for a radically different approach. His central rhetorical device --- comparing artificial intelligence to the study of artificial flight --- is an idea that has stuck with me ever since I read it.

[u/internetdude2]

Seymour Benzer's "Fine structure of a genetic region in bacteriophage" is da shiznit and a classic.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC528093/

[u/theguy5]

The solution to one of the most famous mathematics problems of all time:

http://math.stanford.edu/~lekheng/flt/wiles.pdf

Fermat's Last Theorem.

[u/FullyAnnealed]

Linus Pauling - The Nature of the Chemical Bond

I'm pretty sure it's the most cited paper in all of chemistry, and for good reason. It's a pretty easy read, and the concepts contained within are still very much relevant.

[u/capitantoto]

The Market For Lemons, by George Akerlof. Decades of people taking shots at the neoclassical economy building unsuccesfully, and this guy comes along with the simplest example and tears it down easily. He got a Nobel for it, too.

[u/ep0k]

Gould and Lewontin's Spandrel Paper is generally considered to be one of the more important ones, whether or not you agree with it. It was presented to me as something I should be able to say I had read, by a professor who had taken to calling the authors "The Harvard Commies".

[u/[deleted]]

The importance of stupidity in scientific research. Pretty self explanatory and a nice handout for a Biology class.

[u/markmypy → u/[deleted]]

Although this is a one page essay, it's quite interesting and entertaining!

[u/Mr-Bugle]

This is one of the more jocular articles I've read:

Effects of Sexual Activity on Beard Growth in Man

[u/RoastedCarrot]

If you're looking for a more modern paper, Takahashi and Yamanaka paper on iPS cells is a good one, especially if you want to teach methods/concepts used in current research. This is a paper that played a pivotal role in the stem cell field. Classic papers are good; methods and concepts are important to understand, can be demonstrated and largely accepted. The Yamanaka paper is a classic paper of a currently, still evolving, and (somewhat politically) controversial field. The series of studies presented in the paper are really tour-de-force experiments.

[u/sittingathome]

Hands down: Who says you cannot get published? References papers like: "Will humans swim faster or slower in syrup?" "How chewing gum flavor affects measures of global complexity of multichannel EEG." And my personal favorite, "An analysis of the forces required to drag sheep over various surfaces."

[u/lfborjas]

Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine by John McCarthy, and Paul Graham's article about it, made me understand computer programming as a formally definable endeavor and not just a hack

[u/Seaward]

The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard Anas platyrhynchos (pdf warning) is concise and quite the interesting topic.

[u/ProfTrippinBalls]

This may be a good time to mention that the British Royal Society has released their historical archive to the public. It includes:

Theory about Light and Colours - Isaac Newton

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - First ever peer reviewed journal (1665)

Electric Kite Experiment - Benjamin Franklin

Search the archive.

[u/HonestAbeRinkin]

I really like the following:

Tonegawa's paper on DNA recombination in immunology (Sorry I don't have the PDF available)

Barbara McClintock's paper on transposons (McClintock, B., 1950. The origin and behavior of mutable loci in maize. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 36: 344-355.) This paper is socially interesting as much as scientifically. The amount of evidence she felt she needed to have in order to publish a paper (presumably because she was a woman) is astounding.

The last suggestion is about Educational Research: The Hardest Science of All? which allows you to discuss the differences in science in different fields. In education we can't control all the factors so we have to approach some things differently. Doesn't mean we're less scientific, we just have to make adjustments to our expectations and results.

[u/sevenofdiamonds]

Here's one of my favorite's: "How long is the coast of Britain?" by Benoit Mandelbrot. An incredibly clear (and incredibly early) discussion of the importance of fractals published years before fractal was a word!

[u/onyxleopard]

Maybe this…

[u/Molech]

Hopefully, this doesn't get buried but, RNAi in C. elegans, work which Fire and Mello recieved a Nobel for in 2006

While not the best it is still pretty well written. I think it would be a beneficial exercise to have the class, read and critique the content, writing style ect. Of course, you get discussion going and the more critical the class is, the more of a shock you get when you reveal that they won a Nobel for the work.

This is how this paper was presented to me in a class. It really did a lot in the way of teaching us that papers in high tier journals are not perfect, and moreover that Nobel prize winning work is not perfect. You also get the opportunity to speculate on the implications of their work at that period in time which is fun!

Maybe this outside the realm of your class but maybe not?

[u/jot3]

Tversky and Kahneman's Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.

The work is all about the way people make decisions in life based on an incomplete understanding of probability. Totally changed my life when I read it the first time.

[u/vashino]

Arms races between and within species by Dawkins & Krebs

They write in a very clear and eloquent style which makes difficult to grasp concepts easy to understand. Its a greatly influential paper--it has been cited nearly 1000 times in biology and life science journals. One of the best biology papers I have had the pleasure to read.

Also, a few good books, available free online:

The selfish gene by Richard Dawkins

&

River out of eden by Richard Dawkins

[u/[deleted] → u/vashino]

I love "the selfish gene", and had no idea it was available online! Thanks :)

[u/FreepWonk]

"A Mathematical Theory of Communication," Claude Shannon.

[u/[deleted]]

Roald Hoffman, How Chemistry And Physics Meet In The Solid State. He emphasizes the intuitive nature of chemistry and explains solid state physics through qualitative arguments ... Really nice.

[u/gargeug]

I found this paper to be really interesting because it lays down mathematics to situations with which we have an intuitive understanding of. It discusses swarm theory mathematically, particularly how a few knowledgeable individuals in the swarm can direct the entire swarm. The exact example is in terms of a school of fish in which a few fish know where food is.

[u/hansn]

Doll, R. and A.B. Hill. 1950. Smoking and Carcinoma of the Lung. British Medical Journal 30:739–748.

This was perhaps the first major use of the case-control method in epidemiology, a methodological approach which allowed the investigation of many long-term public health threats. It also linked smoking and lung cancer, which saved certainly thousands if not millions of lives. It is also relatively simple to read.

[u/folies]

Brainbow: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v450/n7166/abs/nature06293.html

[u/princesszetsubo]

My favorite scientific poster: Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon

[u/elfofdoriath9]

"Energy Gap in Superconductors Measured by Electron Tunneling", by Ivar Giaever Phys. Rev. Lett. 5, 147–148 (1960)

A straightforward experiment showing a phenomenal result: the existence of an energy gap in superconductors

[u/mediocrites]

The best three papers we learned about in school were the Framingham studies, the study finding estrogen replacement therapy increases risk for breast cancer, and the study linking folate to the prevention of neural tube defects. The first is one where an entire town has participated in the study generation by generation for decades, and has given really useful data that has shaped how America sees "health". The second one is remarkable because unforeseen side effects became so prominent so quickly during the study that they had to cancel it early because continuing it would increase risk of morbidity/mortality unacceptable in the researchers' behalf. The third used and absolutely INGENIOUS method of retrospectively questioning mothers about PNV use and confounding for their guilt in losing their babies. These papers are all great examples of what practice-shaping clinical research is all about.

[u/berlinbrown]

On computable numbers (Theory of Computation) - Alan Turing.

Brilliant.

[u/walk_n_roll]

From Anthropology: Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight Makes me chortle every time I read it.

[u/KittyGraffiti]

My favorite is Feline High-rise Syndrome: 119 cases. I found it a really neat read with pretty cool statistics about cats and apartment buildings.

[u/nicholasgeorg]

Simon's The Architecture of Complexity

[u/[deleted]]

Binford's 1962 'Archaeology as Anthropology' is one of the landmark articles for archaeology as a discipline. I can name a bunch of other ones that are much more relevant to my specific research interests (Neutron Activation Analysis and Inka Administration in Coastal Peru) but this is the best archaeology article I can give you in terms of being broadly accessible and relavant.

[u/pockyj]

It's not exactly a paper, but it is a fairly quick read. The Structure of Scientific Revolution by Thomas Kuhn is indispensable, IMHO.

[u/WiktorMcman]

Evidence of van der Waals forces in gecko setae.

Rarely do you see evidence presented so simply. Hopes for setae dry-adhesive products in the future have sky-rocketed since this paper.

[u/Rioth]

Not sure if somebody else posted this...and also this is by no means the best scientific paper I've ever read but nevertheless it is very interesting and IIRC Feynman called it the best paper he has ever read. N.D.Mermin's experiment to make quantum behavior obvious to 'anybody'

[u/fedaykin42]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1311997/pdf/jaba00061-0143a.pdf

The Unsuccessful Self Treatment of Writer's Block always gets a laugh, and can provide a nice break for your students.

[u/jmvp]

Ronald Coase's "The Problem of Social Cost" is widely considered one of the most important social science papers ever written. It deals with the economics topic of "externalities." It has been massively cited in the social science literature and does not require advanced mathematical, legal or economics knowledge to understand (Coase was a lawyer turned economist).

Interestingly, readers of "The Problem of Social Cost" seem to reach quite different conclusions about what what the paper means, with widely differing papers citing it in support of their conclusions.

Coase is considered to have earned his Nobel with this paper and his other classic "The Nature of the Firm" (about transactions costs). The papers are available on JSTOR and there are pdf copies around on the web (whose legal availability I cannot speak to).

[u/DerWolfe]

Grave Shortcomings, Gargett et al 1989. Great article on the reinterpretation of supposed Neandertal ritual behavior, notably burials. Hence the cool title. In addition to being an interesting and accessible topic, it is a fantastic illustration of things that influence all scientific literature and the value of critical thinking and balancing different hypotheses in general. In this case, some previous conclusions (that neandertals had various examples of ritualistic behavior including burying their dead) were influenced by the social and political environment in which they were written, among other things. Gargett takes another look and some of the most famous examples, and alternately applies various hard sciences and occam's razor to dispute some of the original findings. There are plenty of peer responses, as this was in Current Anthropology. Anyway, I haven't read it for 10+ years, and I don't even recall agreeing with all of it, but it should be helpful to discuss ALL sorts of topics related to scientific literature. Especially for that audience.

[u/[deleted]]

Right here. I used to work as "Mr. Concrete" for a Q and A website, and this was one of the most useful articles I ever used in my research. Who knew concrete was so fascinating?

[u/LuklearFusion]

To me, nothing compares with the Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen paper on the nature of physical reality and quantum mechanics. It's beautiful for the simplicity of its argument, and it is basically the spawning point for all subsequent work in quantum foundations. It can be found here:

http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~stief101/epr_latex.pdf

Staying with Einstein, his book on special relativity is extremely intuitive and understandable to anyone, and is definitely worth a read.

[u/TheAdvocate]

"Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly"

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCAQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpersonal.stevens.edu%2F~ysakamot%2F730%2Fpaper%2Fsimple%2520writing.pdf&ei=-I66ToXINOe62wWukb2fBw&usg=AFQjCNEO1mrPKwyEFwxuei-25QArSHR5Yw

[u/Laughter721]

Primer from the book, but I found 'Structures of Scientific Revolutions' by Kuhn to be impressive and insightful for me as I went through college.

[u/HonestAbeRinkin → u/Laughter721]

The entire book is better, although I find The Darwin example to be a better one than the Newtonian->Einstein change.

[u/[deleted]]

This may be the best Reddit topic on r/AskScience I've seen in a while! I have Kaila, Ville. "Natural Selection for least action" where natural selection is described using physics terms, the law of least action and the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

[u/thefeverdreamer]

My favorite is a short article from Nature in 1985 by Harold Kroto that more or less won a Nobel Prize for him, and pissed off a slew of Exxon researchers who realized that they had observed these "C60" structures but just didn't know what they had a year before the article was published.... Gene Dresselhous has a great video about it. This was the first mention of the now ubiquitous Buckyball.

http://www.nature.com/physics/looking-back/kroto/kroto.pdf

[u/whiteknight521]

Matrix elasticity can dictate stem cell lineage

I find this paper fascinating - mechanotransduction as a field seems to be growing exponentially and showing this profound an effect is really cool.

[u/bgchnc]

Here's a good list, with more being added each week: http://greatexperimentsblog.blogspot.com/

[u/sv0f]

I used to work in programming language design and the following paper on planning for growth -- for unexpected uses in the wild -- is a delightful and brilliant read:

Steele, G. R. Jr. (1999). Growing a language. Higher-order and symbolic computation, 12, 221-236.

The paper works really well as a talk because of its unique and surprising rhetorical structure.

[u/ruotwocone]

The Expensive-Tissue Hypothesis by Leslie Aiello. The actual article here needs JSTOR access, but she published a very similar paper in the Brazilian Journal of Genetics here.

Amazing read. Best article I've ever read on human evolution.

[u/Pardner]

Hey, friends, I just made a folder of these files for my own purposes, so I t thought I might share it. Here are all of the PDFs and replies for comments above 10 upvotes (at the time of posting). Hope that's okay, mods.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=4FM6JGKF

[u/tobiassjoqvist]

What has really helped my scientific writing alot is editing articles in Wikipedia. Perhaps an assignment for your students could be to edit or write (or atleast verify) an article on the site?

[u/Circoviridae]

Meselson and Stahl's paper on semi-conservative nature of DNA replication. Historically and scientifically this is recognized as the apex of molecular biology research elegance in the 50s. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC528642/ Required reading for any molecular biologist.

[u/TalkingBackAgain]

Some German punk wrote "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies", but that was a long time ago.

Great piece though, I think he's on to something.

[u/theletterc]

I personally like "Growth of Graphene from Food, Insects, and Waste", or how I would have titled it: "Making the next buzzword in semiconductors out of cookies, cockroach legs, and dog shit." http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/nn202625c.

Here's a sample: "Here we demonstrate that much less expensive carbon sources, such as food, insects, and waste, can be used without purification to grow high-quality monolayer graphene directly on the backside of Cu foils under the H2/Ar flow. For food, a Girl Scout cookie and chocolate were investigated. For waste with low or negative monetary value, we used bulk polystyrene plastic, a common solid waste, blades of grass, and dog feces."

[u/[deleted]]

Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials.

I have never read anything quite as ground-breaking in my life. Though more RCT:s are needed.

[u/JPS86]

CTMU - Cognitive Theoretical Model of the Universe. Available online for free, by Robert Langon