Whenever I turn to the business page of the newspaper, I notice acronyms which I do not know the meaning of, such as NCLT or MCLR, and need to go on the Web to understand what they are (NCLT stands for National Company Law Tribunal, and MCLR for Marginal Cost of Funds-based Lending Rate), though they are obvious to the professional businessman. They are the business lingo while not mine. Likewise, how many of us citizens can expand ‘PMCARES Fund’ or ‘ATAL’, or AYUSH, which are used by the government? Please go and look for them. In fact, ATAL is an acronym of an acronym.
Incidentally, an abbreviation or contraction is typically a shortened form of a word used to represent the whole (e.g. Prof. for Professor, or Dr. for Doctor) while an acronym is a set of the initial letters from a phrase that usually form another word, such as DNA for Deoxyribo Nucleic Acid, CBI for the Central Bureau of Investigation, or NDTV for New Delhi Television Ltd).
Spate of acronyms
Sadly, such acronyms have become commonplace, indeed increasing, in scientific papers and presentations. One may understand if acronyms used by astrophysicists are not understood by life scientists, but this happens to be true even within the life science and medical community!
Adrian Barnett and Zoe Doubleday have recently published a paper titled, “Meta-Research: The growth of acronyms in the scientific literature” in the journal eLife which caters to biologists and medical scientists, and is well worth reading. Access it at DOI: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.60080.
A meta-research is the study of previously conducted research itself: the reports presented on the topic by earlier researchers, their reproducibility, and evaluation. Such a meta-analysis is useful, for example in arriving at the optimal dosage of a drug.
Increasing complexity
Let me quote what this paper points out in this meta-analysis: “As the number of scientific papers published continues to grow every year, individual papers are also becoming increasingly specialized and complex. This information overload is driving a ‘knowledge-ignorance paradox’ whereby information increases but knowledge that can be put to good use does not! Writing scientific papers that are clear to read could help in closing this gap and increase the usefulness of scientific research”.
Widespread use of acronyms makes scientific papers difficult to read and understand their message.
The authors have concentrated on the titles of papers in biological and medical journals between 1950 and 2019 (a total of 24 million during these almost 70 years), and 18.25 million abstracts among these.
These papers were extracted from the source PubMed. They found 1.1 million of these had unique acronyms. An acronym here was defined as a word in which half or more of the characters are in capital or upper case letters. mRNA and BRCA1 are acronyms but N95 (the mask we wear) is not. Overuse of acronyms leads to ambiguities, misunderstandings and inefficiencies they cause. For example, the acronym UA seems to have 18 different meanings in medicine. (Here are a few: Uracil-Adenine, umbilical activity, urinalysis, universal anaesthesia).
The authors also quote several such papers with multiple acronyms that hinder understanding; one such is an example, which states: “Applying PROBAST showed that ADO, B-AE-D, B-AE-D-C, extended ADO, updated BODE , and a model developed by Bertens et al were derived in studies assessed as being at low risk of bias”
An exercise
Since, try as I might, I could not understand its meaning, I wanted to challenge my biological science colleagues to teach me what this sentence means. (On an aside, I sent it to 8 young colleagues across the country, and offered the one who came out first with the answer a glass of wine or a cup of cappuccino coffee, and my thanks in the article. The first to come out, within 18 hours, was Manniluthra Guptasarma of PGI Chandigarh. For those who wish to read the article, she asks us to use the link: doi:10.1183/13993003.01485-2015. I thank her and shine in reflected glory as her doctoral thesis mentor!).
More reader-friendly
Many analysts have offered potential solutions towards this. (1) Do not use more than 3 acronyms per paper. (2) Use only established acronyms, and not those which could cause confusion; for example the acronym HR might mean heart rate or hazards ratio; it is best to spell out the word of relevance to the paper. (3) When using a newly constructed acronym, make sure what word it is meant for and why is it needed at all. (4) Lastly, regarding the use of abbreviations, do not abbreviate as far as possible. Often, in a scientific review for the public, or policy makers, and often in doctoral theses, many acronyms and abbreviations are used in various chapters. It is best in these that the list of these be added as a separate chapter in the beginning or at the end.
dbala@lvpei.org
