Single author scientific paper, 'we' or 'I'?
I am authoring a single author paper. Usually when referring to oneself in a paper, 'we' is used. In single author papers I found both 'we' and 'I' (e.g., 'here we/I report xyz').
Which one is stylistically better? To me 'we' seems odd when I read a single author paper.
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2 answers
If it's a single author, use I. I is for singular, and if you are doing the research and all that stuff by yourself, then take credit, unless someone's helped you. If you use "we", then there must be more people other than you doing the research, or someone has been helping you.
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The convention in scientific writing, at least in the hard sciences, is to avoid "I" even for single-author papers. I suspect (but can't prove) that this is why you see so much passive voice in such papers ("the doohickey was then frobitzed to induce a somethingorother reaction").
According to this well-received answer on Academia, you can view use of "we" as an editorial "we" or "we, as in the author and the readers". The latter approach works better for descriptive writing ("we see the following results...") than reporting ("we did X").
Ultimately you should base your decision on the submission requirements of the institution where you intend to publish the paper. But in general, "I" is uncommon, "we" is used even for single-author papers, and you can use "we" in a way that doesn't have to seem weird.
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