ArticleeLife2020
The growth of acronyms in the scientific literature.
Article in eLife, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Fundamental questions in meiofauna research highlight how small but ubiquitous animals can improve our understanding of Nature.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Stroke Is Not an Accident: An Integrative Review on the Use of the Term Cerebrovascular Accident.Neuroepidemiology · 2025Review
- Personalized Jargon Identification for Enhanced Interdisciplinary Communication.Proceedings of the conference. Association for Computational Linguistics. North American Chapter. Meeting · 2024Article
- Article
- Scientific novelty beyond the experiment.Microbial biotechnology · 2023Article
- COVID-19, Framing and Naming a Pandemic: How What Is Not in a Disease Name May Be More Important than What Is.Pathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- The heated debate over NAFLD renaming: An ongoing saga.Hepatology forum · 2023Article
- PopScience: Teaching students to Communicate Scientific Findings to the General Public.Journal of undergraduate neuroscience education : JUNE : a publication of FUN, Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Article
- Article
- Be careful with abbreviations.Journal of hip preservation surgery · 2021Article
- Specialized terminology reduces the number of citations of scientific papers.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Better Writing in Scientific Publications Builds Reader Confidence and Understanding.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Demonstrating the ascendancy of COVID-19 research using acronyms.Scientometrics · 2021Article
- From ACTH to DNA: the rise of acronyms in research.Nature · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Some acronyms are useful and are widely understood, but many of the acronyms used in scientific papers hinder understanding and contribute to the increasing fragmentation of science. Here we report the results of an analysis of more than 24 million article titles and 18 million article abstracts published between 1950 and 2019. There was at least one acronym in 19% of the titles and 73% of the abstracts. Acronym use has also increased over time, but the re-use of acronyms has declined. We found that from more than one million unique acronyms in our data, just over 2,000 (0.2%) were used regularly, and most acronyms (79%) appeared fewer than 10 times. Acronyms are not the biggest current problem in science communication, but reducing their use is a simple change that would help readers and potentially increase the value of science.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.