OP here.<p>I found this paper after a brief reflection on twitter [0] about how we as humans tend so massively to undervalue the power of imagination in favor of pure inductive/deductive logic.<p>[0] <a href="https://twitter.com/leonardofed/status/1018515656067645441" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/leonardofed/status/1018515656067645441</a>
Disclosure: I don't have any published papers to speak of, though I have some patents. But I write similar things -- technical reports -- within my day job.<p>I think the scientific paper or report has always been fictionalized to some extent. The earliest scientists may have been more overt about it. It's doubtful that a bunch of soldiers ever tried to burn an enemy ship with mirrors, but that's how Archimedes reported his idea. As I understand it, it's also doubtful what experiments Galileo actually performed on falling bodies before reporting his results.<p>It seems to me that in a typical paper, one should strive to make the work reproducible, to present the ideas in a form where errors shine out if they are present, and generally to be <i>useful</i> to others.<p>Using the scientific paper to reveal how science is actually done isn't necessarily a good use of paper or readers' eyeballs. We're bad enough writers as it is, and trying to express a "narrative" in every paper may turn the literature into an unreadable and possibly irreproducible mess. There may be better ways of learning the "narrative" of scientific research, namely by just getting in there and doing it, or at least hanging out with scientists for a while.
As far as I can tell the solution he offers is merely to put the Discussion section of the paper first, and go logically from there. I don't see how this really helps. I write lots of scientific papers. You don't read scientific papers to understand how the science was conducted as a first goal, usually - you want the results that make the paper worth writing in the first place. You read the abstract and conclusions first, and then decide whether the rest of the paper is worth reading.
Scientific research papers are meant to be one of the many ways to share what has been done and found, including thought process at the high level. There are many other ways and opportunities, such as seminars, conferences, and just plain talks over the phone, etc., for people in a field to share a lot more details. I am not sure a "yes" or "no" answer to the question is that relevant.
Researchers have become so scared of being ridiculed by peers, I believe, that they are afraid to admit this candidly. One perceived bad paper could be career ending.