My eleven year-old uses lots of words that go over my head, such as “skibidi”, “bruh” and “floptropica”. I’m not meant to understand their conversations and that’s rad.
I also struggle to understand many scientific papers. Sometimes it’s my fault, as I’m too tired or too dumb. But sometimes it’s the authors’ fault, as they’ve drowned their ideas in verbiage and acronyms.
We wrote a fun paper showing that scientific papers are using more acronyms. But what really jams up my reading brain is when the authors use an acronym for their main idea. This is not rare.
Why hide the main idea? Maybe because it’s a phrase that gets used a lot in the paper, but the authors are trading sense for a few syllables.
As a made up but not outlandish example, the whole paper might be about a novel cleaning intervention to reduce infection, which the authors then call “NCI” or worse “NCITRI”. So then rather constantly (and helpfully) reminding me that the whole point is about cleaning, I instead just think of NCI as some generic intervention.
There’s nothing wrong with asking readers to take in a few more syllables, especially when it’s the thing you’ve been studying for years and now want to talk about.