Monday, April 20, 2015

PB2A

Using SCI generator and finding some scholarly articles through UCSB's library website, I found a lot of similarities between the published academic articles and the ones generated online in a couple seconds.
You would expect there to be some noticeable differences at first glance, but surprisingly they look almost the same. The very first things to appear are the title of the paper and the authors, followed by an abstract and an introduction. After that there are some differences, but that is still pretty remarkable that they both begin so similarly. This is important knowledge to have because this may possibly be the general and accepted form for starting an academic article, but thats just me hypothesizing.
After those initial similarities, some of the aspects that make one academic article specific to computer science and the other article was titled "Applying Hierarchical Task Analysis Method to Discovery Layer Evaluation", and honestly your guess is as good as mine as to what that really means. I attempted to read the abstract and even the tone of that was too scholarly for me to understand what was being talked about. After reading more of the article I learned it was about a new kind of search engine similar to google that is starting to be used in libraries across the country. After realizing that both articles had to deal with computers, I figured that some of the similarities between the two are because they both deal with computers (which ties into the whole concept of genres that we covered).
It seems like its important to have a clear and east to follow organizational layout so that the reader could read just the titles of the various section and understand what is being discussed. It also is very apparent that having outside sources and people is necessary to really have a convincing paper. There are cited sources all over each page of both the real article and the generated one. Another thing that is easy to notice in the real articles from the databases and the generated articles is the use of graphs, charts, figures, or images to help the readers follow the process or topic of whatever is being discussed.
One of the major differences I noticed is just the professionalism that I notice with the papers from the database compared to the generated paper. The real papers usually have some simple kind of theme that makes the paper a little more appealing, they all have page numbers and each section has a large chunk of writing that explains it, whereas the generated article doesn't really have long explanations for each section. It just makes the real articles seem like they have more legitimate information to back them up, the generated articles could be completely made up for all I know.
After some explaining the real articles usually have a section for discussion, or the authors own thoughts, which is obviously an important section. Although the middle sections of all the articles I looked at varied, they all had a discussion section. I think this is equivalent to the results section of the generated paper. Both the generated papers and the real ones all have a conclusion which is utilized to wrap up the whole paper overall.
The last major thing I noticed that is obviously important is the bibliography or refrences page(s) that always signals the end of the paper. In a day where plagiarism is easy to do with the internet and all the available sources and opinions, the works cited part of a page is extremely important to make sure credit is given where credit is due. By doing this, the academic world is able to further learn and share opinions and grow as one group rather than individuals.

1 comment:

  1. Hey Nick. I think you made some great points in your essay. I really like when you describe one of the major differences between the SCIgen paper, and the real scholarly article, being professionalism. I like how you continued to describe how the real article gives an appealing description of their topic, while the generated paper didn’t have a good explanation of each subject. Another point I liked that you made was how similar the papers look to each other, and that their layout is almost exactly the same. Overall, I thought your paper flowed nicely and you brought up interesting points.

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