Why scientific papers are growing increasingly inscrutable
Researchers found that the proportion of words in a scientific paper that are acronyms has more than tripled since 1950. (Pexels/)Reading a scientific paper can sometimes feel like deciphering a wall of code. Academic writing is usually jam-packed with sophisticated scientific concepts, but in recent decades studies have also become filled with endless acronyms and abbreviations. Some researchers argue this makes the knowledge and discoveries discussed in the articles unreadable to both scientists and lay people alike.A group of researchers in Australia, including a marine ecologist and a statistician, looked at almost 25 million scientific articles between 1950 and 2019, searching for trends in acronym use. They published their analysis in eLife. The researchers identified more than 1 million unique acronyms in just the abstracts and titles alone, and found that the proportion of words in a scientific paper that are acronyms has more than tripled since 1950.“I could...