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WTF, When Will Scientists Learn to Use Fewer Acronyms?

posted by martyb on Friday August 14 2020, @10:59PM   
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?

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Original Submission

• Re:We need acronyms (Score: 3, Interesting) by zocalo on Saturday August 15 2020, @09:09AM

  by zocalo (302) on Saturday August 15 2020, @09:09AM (#1037017)

  This. I work across various engineering sectors and there are four basic rules we use for this:

  1. *ALWAYS* include a table of abbreviations (NOT the same thing as a Glossary!). ALL abbreviations should be included
  2. First usage is *ALWAYS* expanded ("... deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is ..."), unless it would be completely unambiguous and expected to be understood by your target audience (e.g. "IP address" when in a document about system configuration aimed solely at network engineers)
  3. Do NOT re-use acronymns: "IP" *cannot* mean "Internet Protocol" and "Intellectual Property" in the same document
  4. If your audience includes lay people, then consider supplementing the table of abbreviations with a Glossary that briefly explains what the jargon is; a mini-dictionary

  Generally, most professional documents do something close to this, and I doubt that very many of the publications reviewed by the team in the article failed to do so, and that point really ought to have been factored in. Of all those repeated abbreviations, knowing the percentage of how many were *not* explained within the document would either have make their argument a lot more compelling or, more likely, rendered it completely pointless. As you say, the use of acronyms is well understood in a lot of literature types, and even as a layperson in medicine I'd be fine with the use of "UA" in a paper, provided it was made clear somewhere within the document exactly which of the 18 medical possibilities it was referring to.

  --
  UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!

  Parent

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