Maybe the point is that it is rare for a paper to have the pronoun "I" so many times. Usually the pronoun "we" is used even when there is a single author.
Agreed! It’s pretty alien. I’ve seen brilliant single author work, but nothing that uses “I” unless it’s a blog post. The formal papers are always the singular “we”. Feels very communal that way!
Nice to include the giants we stand on as implied coauthors.
Not being an academic, my (silent) reaction to singular "we" in academic writing is usually, "We? Do you have a mouse in your pocket? Or do you think you're royalty?" It's nice to hear of your more charitable interpretation.
There are, notably, two different if frequently confused “academic we” conventions, distinguished by their clusivity[1]: the inclusive “academic we” in constructions such as “thus we see that ...” refers to the author(s) and the reader (or the lecturer and the listener) collectively and is completely reasonable; the exclusive “academic we” referring only to the single author themselves, is indeed a somewhat stupid version of the “royal we” and is prohibited by some journals (though also required by others).
Yeah, it's the exclusive version that bugs me: "We tested the samples to failure on an INTRON tester under quasistatic conditions." It's nice to hear some journals prohibit it.
It's rare that "I" is used because usually papers have multiple authors, and also the academic community has a weird collective delusion that you have to use "we"... but there are still a reasonable number of papers that use "I".
There's no "collective delusion" here. There is a long-established tradition that formal scientific writing should avoid use of first-person pronouns in general because it makes findings sound more subjective. It's taught this way from early on.
This is slowly starting to change, but it's still pretty much the rule.
For a while passive voice was recommended by lots of courses and some advisors, but I reality most journals never recommended passive voice and now many (most) actively discourage it (e.g. here is the nature style guide https://www.nature.com/nature-portfolio/for-authors/write) , because it makes texts much more difficult to understand. It is quite funny how passive voice became prevalent, it was not common in the beginning of the 20th century but somehow become quite common especially in engineering. It is only quite recently (~10 years) that the move is to back to active voice.
> There is a long-established tradition that formal scientific writing should avoid use of first-person pronouns in general because it makes findings sound more subjective. It's taught this way from early on.
Established tradition doesn't negate "collective delusion".
And anyone who uses the use of "I" in a paper to imply anything about its authenticity is definitely indulging in some form of a delusion. It's not the norm, but is definitely permitted in most technical fields. When I was in academia no reputable journal editor would take seriously reviewer feedback that complains about the use of I.
