PB2A: SCIgen vs Scholars

In an attempt to find a scholarly academic publication that would be readily comparable to the “SCIgen” generated papers, I chose a publication from the Statistics discipline that discussed the causality between exports and economic growth in South Africa. The two pieces of text had more in common than I was expecting, however most of these comparisons involve the layout of the paper. Both begin with a title, authors below, and an “abstract” section providing a brief synapsis of the ideas explored within the following text. Both continue on into their introductions and body paragraphs, tailoring their vocabularies to academic audiences who are familiar with the field of work discussed. They provide graphs, tables and data from whatever it is they’re studying or testing, and examine the results of those physical representations in the body paragraphs. To finish, both have a brief conclusion summarizing what the work set out to accomplish and whether or not it succeeded, followed by a series of references to support the claim.

The similarities between the “SCIgen” generated publications and the actual scholarly papers are uncanny, however when examined closer, the differences are crucial to the validity of the reports themselves. The glaring difference is the sheer length of the “SCIgen” generated papers. These are short, and have much less raw data than any of the actual scholarly publications. They have pictures and graphs, however the snippets below that are supposed to be explaining them simply restate what the graphs themselves say. These generated papers also lack any real citation throughout, unlike the scholarly papers, and therefore make it easy to question the references at the end of the work. Though they have similar language and format to the real papers, these generations are simply a skeleton of an actual academic paper, appealing to a general scholastic audience without any definite subject matter or purpose.

The actual scholastic publication I studied was very different in actual content. It starts off with an understandable title followed with many authors’ names and each of their credentials, already instilling confidence in the text that follows. In the abstract it does the same as the “SCIgen” papers in that it provides a paragraph or two telling what the paper will investigate, followed by the introduction that explains why. The difference here is that the main purpose of the paper stated here will be revisited multiple times throughout the work adding more and more data and explanation to elaborate on and support it. These body paragraphs are much longer than the generated papers and contain more than one type of experiment and data presentation.  It is appealing to its specific audience, those well-versed in the language used within the discipline of Statistics and interested in the topic stated by the title, and doesn’t stray from the clearly defined purpose it has. Another huge difference is the massive amount of citations throughout this type of publication, continually providing as much support possible to build the paper’s credibility in the academic community. Following the body paragraphs are lengthy conclusions restating the original purpose and explaining what the paper found within that purpose. They finish by including a reference to every single source used in the findings.

I believe that the most important aspects of the scholarly piece I chose are the many citations scattered throughout the text and the multiple experiments investigating the papers’ questions it presented in the introduction. The citations provide continuous credibility to every claim and statement made based off of the data it shows. This kind of credibility is valuable to an academic reader because they can see the citation and check the validity of the statement themselves outside of the actual paper. The multiple experiments assist the paper in elaborating on its initial claims as well as keeping the work interesting for its audience. Especially in an academic paper, visual representations are useful in both capturing the readers’ attention as well as giving a physical form to its verbal claims.