Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Post History

60%
+1 −0
Q&A Single author scientific paper, 'we' or 'I'?

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...

posted 7y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

Answer
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T05:45:44Z (about 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 by (deleted user) · 2019-12-08T05:45:44Z (about 5 years ago)
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 user avatar System‭ · 2017-12-29T19:52:33Z (almost 7 years ago)
Original score: 3