Timeline for Is it bad form to use the word “novel” when describing your own work in a paper?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
9 events
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| Sep 4, 2015 at 20:50 | comment | added | O. R. Mapper | @Wrzlprmft: That may be your personal opinion, especially in the case of the word "propose", that is also my personal opinion, but I do not see how that opinion helps if reviewers and other readers simply do not understand what is new without additional explicit markers such as "new" or "novel". | |
| Sep 4, 2015 at 15:39 | comment | added | Wrzlprmft♦ | Even considering that other fields may be insanely different, I am somewhat skeptical about your example (or more specifically that adding a new will solve the issue). The word propose is even stronger than present in directly stating that you came up with this. Otherwise you wouldn’t propose X but only describe it. | |
| Sep 4, 2015 at 14:44 | comment | added | O. R. Mapper | @Wrzlprmft: While it's only anecdotal, it serves well to illustrate what I am referring to: I just got handed back a text by a colleague who pointed out the contribution is not clear. After a brief discussion, we came to the conclusion that to him, the statement "In this paper, we propose an X" is not clear enough and should be extended to "In this paper, we propose a new X". I have made very similar experiences several times before, both in personal conversations and based on reviews of submitted manuscripts. | |
| Sep 4, 2015 at 12:52 | comment | added | O. R. Mapper | @Wrzlprmft: We apply it, and hence we present how we applied it. You present everything you have done, including the non-novel parts. This may well be field-specific, but as implied in the beginning of my answer, my perception is that words like new or novel are used across many papers as a kind of a convention to point out what the contribution is. | |
| Sep 4, 2015 at 12:49 | comment | added | Wrzlprmft♦ | In those cases you do not present the method, you just apply it. As I already mentioned in another comment, almost all papers I have read managed to make clear their contribution without using the words new, novel or similar. | |
| Sep 4, 2015 at 12:42 | history | edited | O. R. Mapper | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
clarified the tl;dr
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| Sep 4, 2015 at 11:15 | comment | added | O. R. Mapper | @Wrzlprmft: In that example, "novel" clarifies that the method in itself is a contribution, rather than just a narrative framing device for presenting something else, such as in "We present a method to transmogrify novel bananas.", or "We present a method to transmogrify bananas. We then evaluate that method with our novel user study model." | |
| Sep 4, 2015 at 9:10 | comment | added | Wrzlprmft♦ | While I agree that it is important what one’s contribution is, I do not think that the word novel helps that much and can be avoided without drawbacks. For example: “We present a novel method to transmogrify bananas” has the same effect and clarification of contribution without the word novel. | |
| Sep 4, 2015 at 8:34 | history | answered | O. R. Mapper | CC BY-SA 3.0 |