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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?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Saturday August 15 2020, @02:22AM
I remember talking to someone who works at a bird observatory associated with a wetlands area and brought up how the ESA was critical to their work. I asked her what ties her local nonprofit had to Europe, she had no idea what I was talking about, and I asked why the ESA would be concerned about what she was doing.
She expanded it to the Endangered Species Act, at which point I told her I thought she had been talking about the European Space Agency. Go figure :-)