ABSTRACT
The authors of journal articles – conditioned as they are by the rewards and punishments handed out in editorial letters – present their research to the academic world in a stylized format. A student reading such articles must think that research starts with a full and balanced survey of the literature, the careful identification of unresolved issues and missing experiments, and the deduction of research hypotheses and experimental designs. There are good reasons for this convention – journals must contribute knowledge to their disciplines in an objective and collective manner. As a picture of the research process, however, it is a complete sham. The literature from which the research so logically follows was often unknown to the authors (unread or not yet published) at the time research was actually designed. The wellcrafted journal article is a masterpiece of rationalization and post-hoc justification.
