We seem to do two things to make our papers size up or down.
Size up: We print all possible analyses to rule out alternative explanations. This lengthens papers considerably, especially archival ones. Why not simply report all of these analyses in one table with a hot link to detailed results? The only matters to be discussed about these robustness results are where they did not work along with as clear an explanation as to why. Doing this is only really important when it involves replication of prior results. In many areas only the main results are in the paper!
Size down: time after time I am seeing key descriptive statistics buried in the text of a paper. This is occurring more frequently in experimental papers. It is hard to understand if means are in the right direction, that is, as the alternative hypothesis suggests if you have to struggle to find them.
Neither of these practices does us any good as scholars.
