The three scientific we’s
I am a grammatical pedant. Therefore, for the record, here is the definitive style guide to using “we” in your scientific writing.
There are three different common uses of “we”. Only one of them is evil. Writers on this subject do not usually distinguish them properly, so the discussion often gets horribly confused. I don’t know the correct grammatical terminology (I’m not that much of a pedant), so I’ll just make up my own.
- “We” used correctly as a pronoun: If there is more than one author on the paper and you are describing something that you actually did as a group, then this is an unambiguously correct usage of “we”.
Examples:“We placed the beaker on the tripod and turned on the bunsen burner.”
“We ran a numerical optimization algorithm to generate the data in fig. 1.”
I don’t think there is any problem with this usage of we. If you want to eliminate it then you have to write in the past passive tense, e.g. “The beaker was placed on the bunsen burner and the tripod was turned on.” This might be what you were told to do in high school, but it just makes the text sound cumbersome and boring. Modern style guides do not recommend this any more. The era of past passive tyranny is long gone and I say good riddance!
- The Royal “we”: There is only one author of the paper and you are describing something that you actually did. The examples are exactly the same as in the previous case.
I’m not a big fan of this sort of “we”, as it makes you sound like Queen Victoria. Personally, I make a point to use “I” in this context. It sounds funny to me, but a lot of people do it and it is not a very big deal.
- “We” as in “you and I, dear reader”:
Examples:“In section 20, we show that quantum theory is even weirder than we thought before”
“Substituting eq. (5) into eq. (4), we see that Newton’s second law is obtained.”
“If we plot luminosity against distance from the Earth, we obtain fig. 3.”
This is the evil “we” and should be eliminated at all costs. Eliminating them does not make your writing sound more passive. In fact, the opposite is true because it usually forces you to bring the object to the beginning of the sentence. Most people, including myself, use a lot of “dearest reader we’s” when writing a first draft. OK, maybe it’s not a big crime to let one slip occasionally, but in general I think it is a sign of lazy writing. You will find your sentences shorter, punchier and more direct if you eliminate them completely. In case you don’t believe me yet, here are the de-”we”d examples:
“Section 20 shows that quantum theory is even weirder than previously thought.”
“Newton’s second law is obtained from substituting eq. (5) into eq. (4).”
“Fig. 3 shows a plot of luminosity against distance from the Earth.”
You may be thinking that this post is rather aggressive. If so, I apologize. My Ph.D. thesis advisor made me remove every single “we” from every paper I wrote with him, so I still have some scars from that process.
WARNING: Do not write a comment unless you have understood the distinction between the three uses of “we” described above.
The The three scientific we’s by Matthew Leifer, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
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Good post!
I’m all for the royal “we”. The first person in scientific papers has always sounded weirdly arrogant to me.
I disagree with one of your examples though – “In section 20, we show ..” – there’s no “dear reader” there is there? (Or have I just failed….)
I had the opposite experience to you by the way – I had to take the “we’s” (many hundreds of them!) out of my thesis…
I suppose “I” could come across as a bit arrogant, but if you think about it you wouldn’t use “we” in this way in any other type of writing, so what is so special about a paper? It cuts both ways. Queen Victoria could use the royal “we” because she was talking about herself as a representative of the British people. According to her usage, in some weird way she actually was the British people. I wonder what the royal “we” is supposed to represent in scientific papers. “We” the scientific community perhaps? If so, it strikes me as slightly arrogant to think you can speak on behalf of the entire community, particularly if you are writing an argumentative quantum foundations paper that 90% of the physics community would disagree with as is occasionally true in my case.
You are right. That’s what happens when you try to write a blog post after spending the whole afternoon de-”we”ing a paper. I guess there should be a fourth category of non-”dear reader” present tense “we”s. Note that the examples of unambiguously correct “we”s are all past tense.
I guess I am generally against this sort of present-tense “we” as well, at least if it is possible to get to the punchline more quickly without it. However, unlike the “dear reader” ones, I don’t think they can always be avoided. In the body of the paper you can make the sort of change I suggested, but in the abstract you wouldn’t be able to because you have no “section 20″ to set the context. You’d have to keep saying things like “this paper shows”, which is less snappy than “we show”. Well, at least that diffuses my arrogant overconfidence on this issue a little.
Now I am really troubled. There must be an alternative meaning for opposite that means “the same” that I do not know about.
Is suppose that in my field of research, single author papers are so uncommon that the use of “I” really stands out.
It simply seems strange to me use a different grammar for single author papers – even if doing so is both more honest and more grammatically correct…!
I wonder what the convention is in, say, philosophy, where single author works are common and grammatical precision is valued.
PS Happy “Pi Day”
http://www.pidaychallenge.com/take-the-challenge
Regarding the royal we:
Dear Matthew,
We do not agree.
I do not mean by this that you and I do not agree with each other, although that may also be the case.
Best regards,
Howard
I will comment even though I still struggle to understand the distinction between the three uses of “we.” In your de-”we”d example: “Section 20 shows that quantum theory is even weirder than previously thought,” I don’t agree that a Section can show anything. Shouldn’t this be written: “We show in Section 20 that quantum theory is even weirder than previously thought.” Or “I show …” if it is a single author paper.
Sorry, I see now my comment was made previously. Maybe you should just correct your article for future readers (are you allowed to correct blogs?). It is one of the top hits on Google when searching for the correct use of pronouns in scientific papers, and one of the only clear statements on this topic.
Just testing whether the new Backtype Connect WordPress plugin is working.
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Matt: it might take a bit longer than usual for your comment to be imported to your blog because the post is almost a month old. Newer posts are refreshed much more frequently. Let me know if you run into any issues
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Well, it appeared on http://backtype.com/connect but not on my blog yet. I’ll let you know if it is not there by the morning.
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