From The New York Times this morning is this summary of a research paper concluding that “scientific papers containing lots of specialized terminology are less likely to be cited by other researchers.” Conversely, papers containing specialized terminology are more likely to get grant funding. This is confirmation of the science communication dynamic we’ve been complaining about for, well, over a decade now---that we’re ramping up requirements to speak in code to one another, but this requirement is actually harming our ability to share work with others, even within fields. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/09/science/science-jargon-caves.html?smid=em-share. Changing this dynamic is much more complicated and challenging than simply training scientists to communicate more clearly, which is often ineffective anyway because clear writing is only part of the challenge, but also because science rewards research, with limited honors for excellence in teaching and outreach.
From The New York Times this morning is this summary of a research paper concluding that “scientific papers containing lots of specialized terminology are less likely to be cited by other researchers.” Conversely, papers containing specialized terminology are more likely to get grant funding. This is confirmation of the science communication dynamic we’ve been complaining about for, well, over a decade now---that we’re ramping up requirements to speak in code to one another, but this requirement is actually harming our ability to share work with others, even within fields. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/09/science/science-jargon-caves.html?smid=em-share. Changing this dynamic is much more complicated and challenging than simply training scientists to communicate more clearly, which is often ineffective anyway because clear writing is only part of the challenge, but also because science rewards research, with limited honors for excellence in teaching and outreach.
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I don’t disagree with your point, David, but do think we’re shooting science in the foot with our mindset that academic writing must be impenetrable.
At the margins, yes. But when it comes to goals like reproducibility and realities like interdisciplinarity, clearly communicating ideas and findings within research is critical. See Science is getting harder to read | Nature Index for another take on this.
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"Had I been writing for a much broader audience in a different genre, it’s the kind of thing I maybe just would have included in the laundry list of scene-setting, just so the more typical mainstream reader would have had a place to mentally rest. I call that making room for the reader to sit down. Sometimes in an essay, I’ll know I'm moving at a really expressive clip, and in editing, I'll say to myself, Oh, Tressie, give people a place to sit down in the essay. If I’d been writing for them, that’s the kind of thing I'd have thrown in so that they can go, “Oh, yeah, that’s the thing I know,” and then they would have felt more confident in continuing to read it because they could have rested their eyes, brains, and emotions. But that is not the audience I was writing to and so I chose to leave those stories out." (https://tressie.substack.com/p/craft-youre-no-stevie-wonder)
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Agreed. I think there’s an either/or implication here: that either journals use specialized language, or they don’t. Alex Csiszar’s great book the history of the Scientific Journal describes how throughout the history of science, there has always been a push to make research more accessible to researchers (through indexes, fiche cards, society journals, etc.), and concurs with the idea being expressed here that even by the end of the 19th century, complex science had become too specialized to have mass market readership (compared to the science of the early 19th century)
What I’m advocating here isn’t that researchers shouldn’t always find the best way to communicate with each other. To the contrary, if journal articles as written today effectively fit that bill, that’s great. What I’m advocating is that so much more is also possible in our age---and I’m not talking here about what Csiszar calls the “fantasy” of having communication practices that make everything open to everyone, but about being open to new ways of communicating that help build a stronger bridge between science and business, between science and policymakers, between different fields of potentially convergent research, and even within fields, where so many sub-specialties emerge that a researcher in bio sub-field 1 may not read or understand journals in bio sub-field two.
To this latter point, what often happens, as my few days at the NAKFI conference in 2014 demonstrated in spades, is that mathematicians, engineers, physicists, and biologists might all recognize the same basic phenomenon, but they all give this phenomenon a different name and describe it differently. What kinds of breakthroughs might we be able to make if they understood each other’s work?
Our choices here aren’t either/or, but all/and. Our open solutions efforts fall are part of a broader effort to try and do more…vitally important, but only part of what’s needed.
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