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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: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 15 2020, @05:17AM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday August 15 2020, @07:40AM (1 child)
Don't you worry, those interested can cope with acronyms pretty well - in comparison with the effort of understanding the paper itself, the use of the acronym is "small change".
Once the convention "poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) = PEDOT" for the purpose of TFA, I find using PEDOT more convenient than reading "poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene)" all over the paper - it becomes easier to read for me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by khallow on Saturday August 15 2020, @02:03PM
Except, of course, when that's not true.
Except, of course, when you run into PEDOT halfway through a book and have to figure out where the acronym was introduced in order to understand what it means.