Personal pronouns in papers

Question

I keep reading that we should absolutely avoid personal pronouns in papers, however, a lot of the academic papers I have read on google scholar use "our work", "our approach", "we define", etc. So, what are the rules on personal pronouns?

Answer 1

The main advice here is to read the "guidelines for authors" of the journals you submit to. There are no general rules, but many journals have their own rules.

I think the general idea here is that scientific results and facts should be impersonal, i.e., they should hold regardless of the author, and they should be presented so that this is expressed.

Personally however I think that this can be misleading, and that authors should rather be encouraged to present personal choices honestly as personal choices, which would require personal pronouns. Same for interpretations, and also there can be space for personal opinions in papers, for example regarding what is worthwhile for future research, or what of a battery of outcomes is most important, or what practical consequences this should have. Of course arguments should be given, but I think taking explicit responsibility by writing "I" or "we" would be a good thing. But it may be against journal guidelines.

By the way, in places I find single authors using "we" to avoid writing "I". My interpretation of this is that it implicitly suggests that the reader and everyone else should agree with what the author writes, and I don't like it. The author should take responsibility, and the reader themselves should decide whether they agree. (Of course I'm not claiming that authors who use this style consciously intend to convey this "implicit message"; I'm aware many just do it because somebody told them they should avoid "I", or they see many others doing it.)

Answer 2

It is possible to overdo the "we" usage and result in an arrogant tone. It is possible to refuse to use "we" and result in stilted writing.

My advice, and it is just opinion, I guess, is that you should write clearly to be understood. You can use "we" if you like, or not. You can use passive voice, or not. But if you value some rule over clarity, you are probably doing it wrong.

Einstein: "It is said that E=mc^2."

There are also different sorts of papers. In pure math papers and other highly technical work the phrasing is more likely to be on the "thing itself", so the authors/creators are more in the background. Not a lot of "we" usage, generally. An introduction might include "In section 3, we show...", but not a lot more than that.

In much of the writing I do, however, more in the human aspects of software creation, I tend to use we, even when writing as a sole author. But the overall tone of that writing is to "invite" the reader to become part of the process of discovery. So, the "we" means "you and I", not "me". But clarity must still rule.

Answer 3

I would argue that in some fields, religiously avoiding pronouns in writing is bad writing at best and misleading at worst. Sure, there is a notion that the results should be generalizable and objective, but if it is not a purely theoretical field where anyone could check the proofs if they so wish, the authors also assume both the credit and the responsibility for experimental results. For in natura experiments in particular, details about their conditions are indispensable. One might opt for presenting the results as "X was observed", but avoiding the notion that these results were obtained at a specific place and time could not - and should not - be done. If this impartiality is being removed anyway, why bend over backwards to change everything to passive voice just to avoid these pesky pronouns in writing?

Referencing your own earlier results is a more complex topic. If "our methodology" is plastered all over the text, it raises questions: are authors even knowledgeable about their peers' research and are they faithfully representing the most up-to-date knowledge in the field? On the other hand, references to prior research may be very natural, especially in Materials and Methods: again, mentioning the authors for every other research item listed but your own is very odd.

And finally, there are cases - niche in some fields, ubiquitous in other - where the authors are the only one working on a narrow topic or with specific equipment. Huge collaborations such as those working at LHC would, naturally, lean towards passive voice in writing, small ones would use more pronouns, but this is a stylistic choice more or less mirroring informal speech patterns. "We saw" is a natural way to describe the experiment when it had 4 people working in the lab but a bit weird one when it had hundreds of people involved.