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posted by martyb on Friday August 14 2020, @10:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the IDK-AMIIC dept.

WTF, when will scientists learn to use fewer acronyms?:

Have you heard of DNA? It stands for Do Not Abbreviate apparently. Jokes aside, it's the most widely used acronym in scientific literature in the past 70 years, appearing more than 2.4 million times.

The short form of deoxyribonucleic acid is widely understood, but there are millions more acronyms (like WTF: water-soluble thiourea-formaldehyde) that are making science less useful and more complex for society, according to a new paper released by Australian researchers.

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Professor Adrian Barnett and Dr. Zoe Doubleday from the University of South Australia (UniSA) have analyzed 24 million scientific article titles and 18 million abstracts between 1950 and 2019, looking for trends in acronym use.

[...] "For example, the acronym UA has 18 different meanings in medicine, and six of the 20 most widely used acronyms have multiple common meanings in health and medical literature," according to Dr. Zoe Doubleday.

Journal Reference:
Adrian Barnett, Zoe Doubleday. Meta-Research: The growth of acronyms in the scientific literature, (DOI: 10.7554/eLife.60080)

Are scientific papers meant to communicate to a lay audience, or to other scientists?


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Friday August 14 2020, @11:51PM (2 children)

    by looorg (578) on Friday August 14 2020, @11:51PM (#1036827)

    Are scientific papers meant to communicate to a lay audience, or to other scientists?

    Other scientists. The other audience, lay people or whatnot such as whomever requested the research to be done such as some kind of management type or politician person, are free to read the real paper at the own peril. Just cause you are not a scientists there are people with strong interests in certain subjects that can comprehend the papers. But for the others there are sometimes a short version, a sort of extended summary -- or the pop science version. They tend to try and cut out most of the "science talk" and just get to the point of what you did, why you did it and the result without going into half the paper being some kind of summary of previous knowledge and what others have done and how your work relates to their work and things like that.

    Abbreviations sort of cut down on the amount of things you get to type. I recon the DNA example, the real one -- not to other one, is probably ok for most people or usage. I would much rather that gets used then having people going around trying to pronounce Deoxyribonucleic Acid. That said it's sometimes very annoying to read papers that are just filled with little in-field abbreviations or acronyms. It sort of destroys the reading rhythm for most people. I try not to use to many of them in the things I write. You just don't really save that much space and it becomes somewhat harder to read. That said everything has it's place. But sure it's annoying when you have some that mean many different things depending on context or across multiple fields of science.

    Perhaps it's some sort of guildification where small groups try and create their own language to keep the strangers out. That can't be ruled out either.

    Otherwise I would say that a lot of scientific papers are mainly there to get your quotation ratio up so you can stroke your own ego, or be stroked by others.

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  • (Score: 2) by TrentDavey on Saturday August 15 2020, @12:50AM (1 child)

    by TrentDavey (1526) on Saturday August 15 2020, @12:50AM (#1036860)

    Yes.
    Kontext is King.
    I remember a classmate asking in an upper year physics course whether the "e" in the professor's blackboard equation was the charge on an electron or the mathematical constant. The professors went ballistic, and rightfully so.

    • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Saturday August 15 2020, @02:16AM

      by krishnoid (1156) on Saturday August 15 2020, @02:16AM (#1036898)

      "My goodness," thought Milo, "everybody is so terribly sensitive about the things they know best."

                      -- Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

      Perhaps justifiably so; you can tell something about people's inner lives based on the real-world events they choose to attach emotional responses.