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WTF, When Will Scientists Learn to Use Fewer Acronyms?

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

Phoenix666 writes:

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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2020, @07:31AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2020, @07:31AM (#1036998)
    The simplification of grammar and spelling in such totalitarian regimes also has another, more nefarious purpose: to attempt to purge words and language itself of subversive meaning. This was the whole point of the Newspeak language that Ingsoc had created in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Exactly how much of this is a conscious effort on the part of such real-life regimes is an open question though. However, as the People's Republic of China is finding, this is actually a much more difficult task than Orwell made it sound. The meanings of words are fungible and it is quite difficult to impose a language from the top down. Words acquire new meanings and euphemisms are born, like the "grass mud horse [wikipedia.org]" (草泥马).

  • (Score: 2) by legont on Saturday August 15 2020, @12:11PM (1 child)

    by legont (4179) on Saturday August 15 2020, @12:11PM (#1037044)

    Should I spell all the nice words weeded out by liberals?

    --
    "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.

    • (Score: 2) by legont on Saturday August 15 2020, @12:17PM

      by legont (4179) on Saturday August 15 2020, @12:17PM (#1037045)

      I actually have another one for our bests to work on - BL. Such as

      A couple of bl's raped a sugar this night.

      --
      "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.

  • (Score: 2) by dak664 on Saturday August 15 2020, @12:50PM (1 child)

    by dak664 (2433) on Saturday August 15 2020, @12:50PM (#1037050)

    Another way this works is to subvert a word by using it as a backronym for a phrase which means the opposite - PATRIOT Act, CARES Bill, etc.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2020, @01:08PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2020, @01:08PM (#1037054)

      +1 Great point!