SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2020, @08:20AM (2 children)
I sometimes get worried when I see basic 101 acronyms and initialisms expanded or explained. It is almost always a sign that someone had what they thought was a brilliant stroke of genius but is unfamiliar with literature in the field and isn't as groundbreaking as they thought. As an analogy think of people explaining DNA and nucelotides in a paper about fungi mutations, explaining what ℕ, ℚ, and ℝ are and what that means in a mathematical paper, or NATO and U.S.A. in an analysis of North American relations.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2020, @09:21AM (1 child)
You used an example of the symbol N as being unambiguous in a math context.
Sorry, it's not. The definition of natural number must always be stated upfront: is it all integers >= 1 or >= 0 ?
To avoid the ambiguity, one can append a 1 or 0 subscript to the N.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_number [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2020, @08:45PM
FTR, I thought I did copy-paste in the subscript too but I guess it got lost in the process somewhere.