As per online guides, actions or events completed are to be written in simple past in academic papers. In that case, specific calculations and observations are to be in the past tense as well. For example:
- X was calculated from Y
- An increase was observed etc.
But in top-class published journals, I see simple present passive forms frequently for the above-mentioned cases. For example:
- X is calculated from Y
- An increase is observed etc.
Do I miss something here?
Best Answer
This is a matter of style guides
Journals and other publishers may have their own in-house guidelines when it comes to usage and grammar. Many follow the top style guides: APA, CMS, and MLA. Social science and economics related journals may very well follow something totally different than the hard sciences.
What you have linked in the comments, is a guide specific to your graduate school. Universities may or may not follow one of the top three style guides. In your case it does; your graduate school follows the APA style guide (scroll to the end of that website and you will see the source).
Some universities even make up their own guides, which are usually very generic and less comprehensive than the top three. Note that university guides may also be inconsistent sometimes (i.e., they take certain things from APA and certain things from CMS and then put them together). And this is why you will rarely find scholarly publications that have exactly the same usage, grammar, and overall style as your university guide (unless your school follows the same style strictly).
Now to address your specific concern, here's what Chicago Manual of Style says (17th ed.) about the verb tense (which is different than what your school follows):
Another one:
And another one:
It is possible that the top-class published journals that you are referring to did not follow the APA style guide, which is the source material for your university's guideline.
Source: Use of verb tenses in APA, Chicago and MLA styles