Post History
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 su...
Answer
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T05:45:44Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/32248 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
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](https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/2948), 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.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2017-12-29T19:52:33Z (almost 7 years ago)
Original score: 3