PB2A

The source that I chose to compare to the SCIgen generator is entitled “Effects of the freshwater aquarium trade on wild fish populations in differentially-fished areas of the Peruvian Amazon”. This article focuses on the many effects that occur from fishing in different locations along the Amazon River, and compares how much fishing is tolerable for the environment versus what would be too much. Compared with the SCIgen, both at a topical level look like they could be published side by side in a scientific journal, yet when diving in deeper into the text, the differences between both become more and more apparent.

To begin, each article has a title at the beginning of the paper, which is then followed by the names of the authors and those who worked on the paper. Although the titles may not make sense at first glance, they serve as an introduction to the papers and give the formal feel that is expected within this genre. Each of these papers also has sectional titles that separate specific parts of the paper, and each are almost identical in the way they present their information. For example, each paper has headings such as “Introduction”, “Results”, and “References”, with each paper having the subheadings following the same order. Also, both papers contain many diagrams throughout the text, which serve as a way to help showcase the data being analyzed. Finally, both papers have citations that are located throughout the writing, along with at least 12 accompanying sources. These sources and references are a huge part of the genre of research papers, and serve as an important tool in fitting inside this genre.

On the other hand, one of the main difference between the two papers is the obvious difference of one saying complete nonsense (SCIgen), while the other explains, in rigorous detail, a long process of observations and experiments that were performed in order to learn about fish in the Amazon. Also, after looking through dozens of papers through the Library Website, you can begin to notice the length that many of the publications have and the enormous amount of detail that everything is presented with. The SCIgen has none of that, and mostly produces a large amount of nonsense jargon, which results in that paper being a much shorter length than almost every publication I saw. Overall, the SCIgen papers are able to be effective in fitting in while actually saying nothing, because they follow the conventions that are present within the genre.

In regards to the Fish Article and the most important components of it, one main focus can center on the citations and how frequently any paper of ‘scholarly’ standards uses references to help build its argument. It can potentially be considered to be a form of ethos in the way that the author can build off the information presented by other authors who have reputations and credibility from their earlier works. By building off these other, more-credible authors, an author using the citations can seemingly ‘ride’ the reputation established by the first author, and can begin to steadily increase their own.

The SCIgen papers also showcases how important citations are within this genre of papers. A SCIgen paper’s main goal is to emulate and look like an actual research paper, so it must therefore use actual conventions that are common within the genre it is trying to fit in. Although other conventions are used throughout the SCIgen papers, those are mostly structural and the structures between papers may slightly vary between each, whereas citations will almost always be there and be a way to help build on what is trying to be said. In the end, citations and referencing— the building off other’s people’s ideas—is one of the basic and most important components of a research paper and research in general.