Preface: Judging others by yourself

[Geoff Hart <geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

     Lori Lathrop noted that <paraphrase> assuming most readers ignore
     front matter such as the preface may be an error due to judging others
     based on your own feelings. While true, I have to say that my own
     general impression, unscientific though it be, is that most readers
     ignore such material. To qualify this, I'm working in scientific
     publishing and technology transfer, and our preliminary sounding out
     of our audiences supports this feeling; no numbers, no t-tests, but a
     lot of our audience won't read anything more than two pages long (too
     busy) and only reads the abstract and results/discussion of papers.
     (Exception: if they want to repeat the experiment, they'll read the
     methods; if they want to save time looking through the library,
     they'll read the intro and the references.) I can't say if "a lot" is
     the majority, but not reading anything they don't have to seems to be
     a recurring theme. This reflects my real-world experience as well as
     my time at university. One colleague even went so far as to admit to
     writing much of his Master's thesis without referring to anything more
     than the abstracts of the papers he cited... not a common practice,
     perhaps, but certainly not unique in my experience.

     Like Lori, I'd like to see a study with good data to support/refute
     this assertion. For the moment, in the absence of such a study, I'd
     note that you can err just as easily by assuming that the audience
     will all want to read your preface. In particular, anything longer
     than about one page is _likely_ to go unread from what I've seen, so
     use such materials with caution.

     --Geoff Hart  #8^{)}
     geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca