I'm no scientist. I was published in one scientific journal. I wrote for ~6 blogs under various pen names, never achieving more than 10K views. But I am friends with a metric shit ton of scientists. So I am qualified to say most, not all, scientists believe in their work. They want you to understand their work, agree with it, and, maybe even, read the citations they reference. To that, citations must go up front.

Let’s step back from academia, where your work would get thrown out for the crime of including citations anywhere but the end. Academia doesn’t match real life. It is written purposefully pedantic, with jargon that is technical, to obscure the ability of the average person to read it. Academia has a facade of pushing truth first, but enables papers the likes of Daryl Bem’s “Feeling the Future” and Jung et al.’s “Female hurricanes are deadlier than male hurricanes.” (Dont’t get me started on academia when Jews/Israel are/is involved!)

Let's think instead to a joke. You don't start with a punchline. You start with the setup vis-à-vis citations. Citaitons are what you need to know before the argument comes. And yet, academia has normalized setup after the punchline. Citations at the end are the, “OH! NOW I GET IT!" of writing. It’s part of an oft-criticized method of keeping respected journal publications in the hands of academia only.

Like my rants of the past, I am focused on citations rather than other criticisms of academic writing, because I believe we can fix this and not that. You can write a school paper, put your citations up top, get points deducted by your grader for breaking the rules, ask your grader why they think citations must go at the end… yadda yadda yadda… win a Nobel prize. I’m not asking you to break the format all together. I get the imporance of citations. I’m acknowledging there’s a lot to criticize in writing, which I can’t fix, but one thing we can start to fix.

There are multiple published papers on the issues of peer review. They ask whether truthiness derives from others acknowleding a truth. Ignaz Semmelweis, a pioneer of our modern healthcare/antiseptic procedure, was put in an asylum due to his peers. We all wash our hands today. Clearly, peers are not a perfect solution. Everyone has bias, ignorance and inconsistencies. So we embrace paradox in life. Critiques of peer review also cite the raised cost and reduced speed of academia due to the cumbersome process.

Seriously, I can go on and on about the peer review process. But I’d need to acknowledge that I do not have a replacement for it. Removing the process would flood the world with more bullshit. We already have social media for that! Peer review is a disaster that I am not qualified to fix.

Grant writing is another regularly discussed academia hell space. Grants have pushed academics to move away from their own interests, to the interests of those paying them. If the grants are going to the ‘benefits of tobacco,’ you’re guaranteed more studies showing the (real) inverse correlation between cigarette smoking and Coronavirus hospitalization. The effects of this are clear to anyone who’s studied STEM or “social sciences.” In the past, when friends have asked if they should spend their youth trying to get a PhD, I’ve answered, “Only if you like one micro-aspect of that field, not the field as a whole. Biologists rarely get to focus on the whole body. They get to pick one protein of 20,000, or the Golgi complex instead of the cell.” It’s established that science can not evolve at her full potential, because the money is interested in other things.

Sadly, science has lost some of its greatest professors, including tenured professors, due to these faults. But I have no solution to this disaster. I would love to make a “Science Fair for Non-Scientists” and take other measures to encourage the evolution of academia beyond the University. I believe, “Yes, the cure for cancer comes from a monotonous procedure academia has setup, coupled with international, multi-organizational collaboration. However, the cure for rare disease will come from non-career academics who can look past where funding is to give answers that dont profit.” These layman will do what serves them, not grants. They will put their citations at the start of their writing.

Here is what I propose: Citations up front, when you actually want them read. I don’t care if there are 5 or 20 relevant citations. If you are saying, “You should read X to understand Y,” present the opportunity to do so. Don’t destructure your jokes unless there is a reason to do so. The asides and extra details can go at the end, as a little treat. I'll call it “Citations That Matter” and “Nerd Out Citations” due to lack of effort to classify these two in a more coherent manner.

In TV and movies there can be a debate whether a citation was misused. I’m aware of our reality — reviewers and other readers don’t plunge into the depths of citations. They just don’t. They hopefully are familiar with some or most citations and the concepts that arise from them. You don’t have to have analyzed the entirety of “Rat Park” to know the conclusion. So it is bizarre to expect each strawman and false association to be found. There will always be a sense of, “If you say so!” when you’re reading something. That’s OK.

If academia had its way, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” would have a big red X with comments like, “Confusing! Redundant! Write ‘87 years.’ Do you have a source that all men are created equal?” Other famous orators would be told to say “I” less often, because that one letter word is unacceptable. And yet, people, especially politicians, know what works for the masses.

With online writing, hyperlinks rule. You will stop reading this sentence to click on a blue, underlined link, even if I do not ask you to. It’s intutitive to assume the link is relevant. As a writer, if you want the reader to know content before reading further, you include it first. Likewise, when you watch a good video, they show the referenced material before the analysis. If there’s extra nuggets, they go with the credits for people who care enough to watch. Maybe they even go in a Patreon link for those who pay more, for the stuff that doesn’t matter.

This isn’t a matter of emphasizing societal laziness. This is a matter of what makes sense. A writing’s start gets emphasized, then attention gets lost. We should not be affirming a method of writing papers that encourages readers to hit ‘ctrl/cmd + f’ and find the tl;dr summary. We should be writing to our modern, societal standards, and writing in a way that we enjoy. Please, break the rules.

Rather than use citations on my rant about citations, I have elected to use assorted images and memes: