SCP Foundation

This one's been bugging me for a while. Why does our research reveal so little and almost never result in a new discovery? For example, the 'telekill' material. Literally all we've done is find it and hoard it. For some weird reason, we haven't been able to find out what it is, despite us having a ton of it.

There are also countless examples of SCPs where we have absolutely no idea how to analyse the cool stuff they can do, but we keep them around (169 or something, the old man), supposedly for the good of science. The GOC has clearly had success destroying SCPs, so if we suck at research, the logical course would be to destroy the object.

Seriously, guys, stop being so hard on the researchers! Give them a breakthrough for once!

I tend to agree. I like to imagine the Foundation does research when it can or is able to glean anything from it. A lot of this stuff are byproducts from the old days (for example, every skip you list has been written 2011 or prior), where people wrote with a "contain-first, worry about research second" attitude. People have been trying to move away from that, but sometimes, the Foundation isn't able to learn much about a certain object. You can only do so much without actually finding the source of the thing itself.

Seriously, guys, stop being so hard on the researchers! Give them a breakthrough for once!

It depends on how you look at things. In another time, we think differently.

I, for one, am no scientist and can only write the most basic of sciencespeak believably.

I have put a great deal of thought into writing about all the tests the Foundation did with SCP-2273 in order to find out the shit they casually put into its Description. (Lotsa tissue sampling, more than a few physical exams, and more than a few runs through big X-ray and similar imaging machines. Also, asking him to carry heavy things and punch things. All while sciencing it up with notes and beakers and lab coats and stuff.) However, it's like I said, it's all about believable sciencespeak, something I fear I can't do.

One part of telling a story is the conservation of detail. If talking about it to contributes nothing to the story, then don't talk about it.

If you want anomalies in your SCP to continue being anomalous and mysterious, then make it impossible for the Foundation to research any meaningful information out of it, or just completely skip the researching part and never actually talk about it.

If you want some particular knowledge about your SCP to become a shocking revelation to the readers, or some other reason that makes it useful to the story, then go ahead and let the Foundation research that out.

Because you're treating articles as evolving over time. They don't, articles are just what they seem to be: point in time stories. If something was written in 2009, of course we'd probably have discovered new stuff by now, but that's not how it worked. If that was the case, all these articles would have to be living documents, updated every now and again with new info.

I lean towards dankaar's explanation. The only anomalies we see on the mainlist are the ones that haven't been EX-ed yet, and the number of EX's are a lot larger than that list we have, just because writing one of those is really hard.

For example, in a tale for the Resurrection canon, one researcher has 9 explained SCP's to her name. We never find out what they are, but they exist. Just because we don't write breakthroughs doesn't mean they aren't happening.

The researchers keep getting themselves eaten.