Why do I need to write 2-page (or longer, usually much longer) papers on ideas I can summarize in three words? For example, say I discovered a new Mersenne prime (not something I would waste my time on!) and wanted to publish a paper on it. What would it look like?

Well, the meat of the paper can be summarized in three words: “2^x-1 is prime”. However, you’d get some long treatise on what Mersenne primes are, how they were discovered, the connection with even perfect numbers, the current role of GIMPS, applications to cryptography, and future work (finding even larger primes, duh!) Somewhere about halfway through the paper, I’d mention that I found a new prime using those same three words (only after explaining how I set the software up, conducted the search, etc.) If I wrote another paper up on the same topic, I’d just spit out the same information again, but with different wording.

This is one of the root causes of problems in science today.