: Should an academic paper contain all text at the same structuring depth? I'm not sure whether or not this is standard practice, but I've been taught that between two different-level headings,

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I have published several peer-reviewed scientific papers, also Master's Theses in two different disciplines and a long doctoral dissertation. Your proposed rule is not one I have ever followed, and not one any editor or reviewer ever complained about.

I take a pragmatic approach: In some sections like "Future Work", 100% of the text follows the main section heading; 7 Future Work. There are no subsections; to save space I don't subhead different kinds of future work. I might enumerate them, or might just start new paragraphs, since the description is generally short.

In other sections, I have introductory text following the main section then sub-sections and sub-sub-sections. I say "pragmatic" because if no text is necessary then I don't write any!

The point is to communicate the science in an orderly fashion, beyond that, anything there as filler to follow a form is extraneous and should be omitted. Also on the pragmatic side, unlike theses and dissertations, most journals have a page limit, and I compress away as much of the headings as I can to fit more prose or charts into the writing, because I am usually up against the page limit.

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