The present simple form often appears in abstracts and summaries of academic works such as articles, chapters, dissertations, theses, essays.

This article looks at the effect of transoceanic migration on rural Sicilian families. The author focuses on the conflicts, stresses and transformations experienced by members of transnational families.

The present simple form is often used to report the outcome, results or findings of a piece of research:

This paper discusses some asymptotic uniform linearity results of randomly weighted empirical processes based on long-range dependent random variables. These results are subsequently used to linearize nonlinear regression quantiles in a nonlinear regression model with long-range dependent errors, where the design variables can be either random or nonrandom. These, in turn, yield the limiting behaviour of the nonlinear regression quantiles. As a corollary, we obtain the limiting behaviour of the least absolute deviation estimator and the trimmed mean estimator of the parameters of the nonlinear regression model.

Reporting significant aspects of people’s work

The present simple form is often used to report major tenets or central aspects of the work of other academics, especially where such work is considered important or relevant to the present context:

As Wittgenstein suggests, there is no such thing as a private language.

[lecture on text linguistics]
Halliday argues that there are three basic transitivity choices. Okay. And he calls them process options.

However, where the citation reports experiments and specific studies, the past simple is preferred.

Unlike previous work, our study personally followed subjects rather than relying on record linkage methods to obtain information on death. In addition, we examined mortality differences for men and women at several points from the beginning of the illness and over its course.

Creating synopses of fictional plots in works of literature

The present simple is used to summarise the plot/events in e.g. novels and plays:

Four men once close to Jack Dodds, a London butcher, meet to carry out his peculiar last wish: to have his ashes scattered into the sea. For reasons best known to herself, Jack’s widow, Amy, declines to join them.