Re:Intuition in Mathematics (2012) [pdf]
by tpetricek on Monday January 23, 2017 @09:24AM
(#13462306)
Giving "overview of the rest of the paper" that points out what will be happening in future sections is quite common in academic literature - there are better ways to phrase it (and many people writing academic papers, myself included, try to word it so that it does not sound that silly), but this wording (even if grammatically quite clumsy) sounds pretty standard to me - I would not overthink it as a "lack of confidence".
This is a class of stylistic issue that's common in professional writing by those new to it and usually stems from a lack of confidence in the topic or in one's self.