Examples of Mathematical Papers that Contain a Kind of Research Report
Richard P. Stanley's How the Upper Bound Conjecture was proved ends with two morals:
- The shortest path may not be the best.
- Even if you don’t arrive at your destination, the journey can still be worthwhile.
The paper
Rawnsley, John; Schmid, Wilfried; Wolf, Joseph A., Singular unitary representations and indefinite harmonic theory, J. Funct. Anal. 51, 1-114 (1983). ZBL0511.22005.
contains an unusual “Historical Note” (pp. 102–107). E.g.:
For various reasons one expects to get $\mu_n$ by... That does not work directly because... In 1975, S & W tried... At that point it became clear that an intrinsic higher $L_2$ cohomology theory was needed... In 1977, R & W looked... They did not see how to... This was the point at which S & W had been stopped... During the following academic year B succeeded in... but the method did not extend past... R & W made some progress in... These results were not published formally because... During the summer of 1979, S & W discussed the apparent disparity and clarified... then carried out a computation... then looked at the case... Thus the original S & W problem was settled... At the end of the summer of 1980, S & W saw that... could be simplified... The present version was completed in... There are two important parallel developments which we understood only after... (etc.)
The prime example is Euler's papers. This style is out of fashion in 20th century. Polya in Mathematics and Plausible reasoning discusses this question at length and even reproduces completely (in English) one of Euler's papers (on partitions).
Of the 20th century examples I can mention
MR1555091 Malmquist, J. Sur les fonctions a un nombre fini de branches définies par les équations différentielles du premier ordre. Acta Math. 36 (1913), no. 1, 297–343.