It's been a few years, but I remember having to systematically go through all the papers my advisor and I were publishing and remove any 1st person references, direct or otherwise. It was best practice to avoid mentioning the authors directly at all, but when it just would have made the wording hopelessly awkward, I was allowed refer to myself or our research group as "the investigators" in the 3rd person. I've seen in that cop-out used in several other papers as well. These were engineering, chemistry, and physics journals for the most part. Expectations vary from journal to journal, and I expect the differences widen across disciplines.
Frankly, I think most scientists and engineers out there have woefully inadequate writing skills to begin with. Most of the scientific papers I've read seem like they were written by people hell-bent on coming off as intellectually superior as they possibly could rather than actually communicating the intent and content of their research. I'm all for making full use of the enormous vocabulary language has to offer, but there comes a point where some of these authors are dropping in so many gratuitous 5+ syllable words that I have to wonder, who exactly are they trying to fool/impress? I don't care how complicated or esoteric your topic, you ought to be writing with an eye to making it possible for a lay person to at least understand the gist of what's going on. If you don't, in the end you are shooting yourself in the foot. No one with a choice will bother to read it.
My general rule of thumb is that if you sound like an ass saying it out loud, you need to find a better way to write it.
