At least once a day I remember how much I hate the absurdly low word limits in health-related journals. 3,500 (or in today's case, 4,000) is not enough words, and only serves to convey incomplete and misinformative-by-oversimplification publications.
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Replying to @NoahHaber
Hard disagree. Having worked for a while on both academic and public publications, I find journal word counts are, if anything, not restrictive enough. Longer articles encourage endless waffling, and rarely improve the actual communication imo
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Replying to @GidMK @NoahHaber
The issue is, as I see it, that introduction and discussion are given far greater emphasis by most journals than methodology. We should care more about what people have DONE not what they think is important about those results
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Replying to @GidMK
Agree with your latter absolutely, not so much the former. This may be the problem: 3,500 words is for "communication" to non-researcher decision-makers. But the vast majority of papers aren't even remotely of sufficient quality to be communicated to those decision-makers.
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Replying to @NoahHaber @GidMK
For those papers that are building evidence but not independently strong enough for direct communication (which is nearly all of them), we need room to explore every nook and cranny, every relevant robustness check, chart, and relevant theoretical concerns.
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Replying to @NoahHaber
Sure, but the word count is rarely used in methods and results. I don't think increasing the word count GENERALLY does much more than add waffling in the discussion about how great the study was and how important it all is
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Replying to @GidMK
Hard disagree :). For reference, many fields (I default to econ) have papers that are about twice as many words on average, with a vastly higher proportion of it spent on methods and results, and are still denser than health journals.
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I guess this is the problem with talking across fields lol. I rarely read econ papers, very much talking about health/epi, I'm sure it would vary a lot!
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