What tense and person is a scientific journal written in?

Question

What tense and person is a scientific journal written in?

Answer 1

They are actually written in whatever tense and person is logically needed to convey the thought.



When talking about the past, we write in the past ("..protein was expressed in Escherichia coli, purified and refolded as reported earlier", "analysis of the backbone geometry revealed")



When talking about the present, we write in the present ("we propose a novel mechanism", "spectrum is shown in fig. 5.2")



When talking about the future, we write in the future "The data accumulated will open up possibilities for..."



Scientific merit and clarity of thought are more important than any sort of preset language rules. If the editors disagree, they can correct what they don't like to fit the journal style, that's their job.



(as for active vs. passive, I agree with oikos)

Answer 2

It varies with the journal somewhat. Currently, the tendency is to avoid the passive voice in favor of the active one. Passive is pompous and takes up more (very expensive) space. Use the past tense to describe what you did in the past or when citing another paper [Jones, 1997, said that . . . .]. Use the first person in describing what you did, third person when talking about someone else, whatever is appropriate.



To be safe, read a few papers published recently in the journal and study the writers' guidelines.

Answer 3

It's always written in past tense.



If necessary, third person is used, but generally they don't use any person at all- you mention human involvement in experiments as little as possible.



For example, suppose you heated a jug water to 100 degrees. In a scientific journal you'd right "a jug of water was heated to 100 degrees". You don't mention the fact that people did it unless this is somehow important for the experiment (eg if you were comparing how well humans and machines did the same task).

Answer 4

I usually see any person and tense except the singular first person. Even if there is only one author, you do not write "I make the following computation", you still write "we make the following computation".