Many reviewers suggest omitting words like 'I' and 'We' from a research paper. However, I feel interesting to read papers that feel like a story of the author's journey to the finding s/he is going to present. The paper that omits words like I and We feels plain and emotionless. There is an argument that scientific articles have to be to the point, formal and there exists no area for emotions. What is your view on the emotions that a researcher puts on writing her/his articles and the space that today's journals provide for them?
While I do agree that the lack of I/we makes a paper more plain, I do not think that the use of I/we is a sign of emotion, but rather of individual human decisions. And as much as the scientific community tries to establish best practises and gold standards, there are individual decisions in every study. Those decisions have to be made in situations where there is either no best practise at all or (ironically) more than one best practise. Then it is up to the researcher to decide what to do, and this should be clearly communicated using I/we. I reckon that when reading a paper, we usually don't know anything about the authors, a line of surnames is all we see. So it is easy to forget that these are real humans who wrote the paper, conducted the study, and analyzed the data, and that those humans have opinions, world views, experiences, skills, etc. that all influence the decisions they make. So being more encouraging about the use of I/we in papers would be a good way to remind the reader to take everything with a grain of salt, and that is is okay to have an opinion in science, as long as you flag it as such.
There are different expressions of cross-cultural emotions. The use of 'I' or 'we' is required according to the APA style to take responsibility for one's own sayings and one's own research. However, most of the researchers and journals around the world still follow the obsolete passive writing style.
Whether you love or hate the results of your studies, whether you find them repulsive or attractive, is -- in my view - scientifically irrelevant. Your results speak for THEMselves.
So why do we consider OURselves and OUR feelings so important?
For some time now as a reviewer for several journals I have been crossing out the the the authors and adding We It softens what is often turgid papers by the time the rewrites come back. It makes it more appealing to readers if authors show they are taking the reader on a journey starting with the research idea and ending with the results and their meanings.
I am always surprised at why we seem to dissect everything we can.......How someone presents their own writing, opinion or findings are unique to them......When did life become so dependent on the words we use and not simply admiring the content.......Take what you may from an article a book or You-Tube video and let the rest just be...... Being the best Captain of your own Ship, will allow other Ships to sail freely too.........
I think it is necessary to include words like 'I' and 'We' in scientific papers to increase the responsibility of researchers.
First, I agree with Josephine Zerna in that words like "We/I" not necessarily contribute to emotion in a paper. Aside from that, I do enjoy papers in which emotion can be perceived. But that brings me to the point that there are kinds of papers where emotions are important, even desirable, and papers in which they are not. In theoretical and experimental papers, what is important is the knowledge about some topic thay they grant. But there are other kinds of papers in which, in deed, I delight with the emotions expresed by the authors. Actually, what is great about these papers is that they were writen by the greatest theoretical and experimental authors I know, and I am able to know how they were feeling about something. A marvelous example of what I am talking about is a special number published in 1987 in which, the researchers who create the Journal of Experimental Analysis of Behavior, wrote about what they experienced in the process of giving life to one of the most important journals in behavior analysis. So I rather prefer more papers of that sort getting published than making emotional theoretical and experimental ones.
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