The best-written scientific paper you have read

I changed my mind about best-written scientific paper after someone here asked me for the source and I could not produce one. That is worth saying out loud because it is the ordinary way it happens.

Best-written scientific paper is well covered in the tag pages, and the older discussions are better than the recent ones because they were argued out properly. Worth twenty minutes before adding to this one.

Humour: light, relevant humour is welcome. Cruel humour targeting individuals or groups is not.

Reading it again, the caveat matters more than the finding.

A digression that keeps occurring to me: the most-linked documents here are the dullest ones. Nothing gets cited like the unit-arithmetic page.

That is the practical version. The rigorous version is longer and says the same thing.

Best-written scientific paper looks different depending on whether you are reading the primary literature or the summaries of it, and the difference is not in our favour.

Best-written scientific paper: I have looked for the primary source twice and failed twice. Either it does not exist or it is somewhere I do not know to look, and I would like to know which.

Two things can be true about best-written scientific paper at once: the mechanism is plausible and the evidence for the size of the effect is thin. Most of the argument here is people defending the first against attacks on the second.

Something worth flagging about best-written scientific paper: the strongest-sounding claims in this thread are the ones with no source attached, which is the usual pattern and not a coincidence.

Loosely related and not worth its own topic: the vocabulary here has leaked into how I read everything. I now notice when a press release gives a relative figure and no absolute one, which is most of the time.

A single observation, in a thread that deserves better than single observations.