I am pretty new here. So my post could be totally displaced, but I will try anyway.

It seems to me that the aim of a forum on good papers is to stimulate that many more good papers will be written.

Diversity
The vehicle that is mostly used in this forum to achieve this goal is that of posters pointing out – what they consider to be – examples of good papers. I have no doubt that these papers are of indeed very high quality. The problem I have is with the diversity. Let us restrict ourselves for the time being to the Nature journals. Their scope varies wildly from medicine, biology to astronomy and climate science. The culture in these disciplines differs considerably. So my view is that pointing out an excellent paper on global warming is not going to help very much a physics postdoc who wants to write a good paper.

Dissect a paper
My suggestion for referencing a good paper is to do, what old-fashioned biologist know very well, dissect it.
A paper has a title, a list of authors, a list of affiliations, a corresponding author, an abstract, paragraphs, figures (graphs), figure captions, tables, table captions, conclusions, equations, acknowledgements, a list of references, footnotes, appendices, etc.

Example: Figures
It would be worth while to identify examples of good figures and captions. Criteria could include: use and abuse of arbitrary units, absence of spaghetti text in captions (caption saying: “see for explanation text”), good labeling, sensible color coding, self-explanatory caption.

Benefit
I could imagine that many more junior scientists from all science disciplines could learn and profit from such atomic examples.

But maybe this change of focus would be beyond the scope of this forum.

Ad Lagendijk
sciencesurvivalblog