Current Events > Readability of science has decreased over time, due to more authors and jargon.

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://elifesciences.org/articles/27725

Some of this is likely unpreventable as knowledge becomes more intricate, but some of it is certainly preventable, like increases in usage of words like "novel" or "robust".
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*due to most of it being hidden behind paywalls
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do you see this as a sign of diminishing returns?
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foreveraIone posted...

do you see this as a sign of diminishing returns?

naw.
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flussence posted...

*due to most of it being hidden behind paywalls

www.instantrimshot.com
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I really hate reading scientific papers that provide hardly any information or help on reproducing their work. Most of the time, it's like "derive and solve this implicit differential equation" to get your answer
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Up.
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FightingGames posted...

I really hate reading scientific papers that provide hardly any information or help on reproducing their work. Most of the time, it's like "derive and solve this implicit differential equation" to get your answer

No appendix? That would definitely suck. I would think contacting the authors would be a good place to start. Most of us are quite helpful when asked to discuss our science.

Some of my stuff would be difficult to reproduce because I used equipment that is housed behind national laboratories and couldnt be reproduced without grant proposals which isnt going to happen.
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One of the main issues is that many of the mainstay reference materials and articles have become a lot less accessible as they aged and been further examined.
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flussence posted...

*due to most of it being hidden behind paywalls

Lol. Yep.

But anyway it's not all that surprising considering the standards in scientific peer review have become in many ways an issue of speaking to people in the field about issues you're studying. I didn't see the more authors part, where was that? Also people who use jargon without properly defining it when it is introduced are doing it wrong. Hell you can make up your own little phrase just to describe something, just define it.

I would imagine the too many authors issues goes back to the large push for people to get their degrees, which is online with scientific job seekers being too plentiful these days. This problem though can't be new, in the sense that quality control has existed there for many years and while new averages may exist so does good science. There are a few issues over the past century that have affected this and rhetoric in general though so I'd be interested in seeing the chart on a 100 year scale.
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P4wn4g3 posted...

Also people who use jargon without properly defining it when it is introduced are doing it wrong. Hell you can make up your own little phrase just to describe something, just define it.

I mean, that's not the issue at all. Most jargon, or at least the specific scientific jargon category referenced here rather than the gender scientific jargon category, have very specific jargon. But it means that the work will be harder to read, especially to those outside the field.

To the extent to which we can, we should be writing papers that could be read by a scientist in any field.
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COVxy posted...

P4wn4g3 posted...

Also people who use jargon without properly defining it when it is introduced are doing it wrong. Hell you can make up your own little phrase just to describe something, just define it.

I mean, that's not the issue at all. Most jargon, or at least the specific scientific jargon category referenced here rather than the gender scientific jargon category, have very specific jargon. But it means that the work will be harder to read, especially to those outside the field.

To the extent to which we can, we should be writing papers that could be read by a scientist in any field.

Eh. I'd rather have short, precise papers than vague ones that can be consumed by a generally educated person.
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IllegalAlien posted...

Eh. I'd rather have short, precise papers than vague ones that can be consumed by a generally educated person.

How often does research actually relate to a single field now-a-days, though?

We have disparate fields who are often studying the same exact phenomenon, but don't know it because of jargon. We have to admit that this is somewhat of a problem.
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Yeah, well you're supposed to define your jargon. Or at least include a reference for it.
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man I think I saw a related study that showed there were returns to authors who used more jargon/write in a less readable manner (in terms of... number of articles published? number of citations? I can't remember) but now I can't find it
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COVxy posted...

We have disparate fields who are often studying the same exact phenomenon, but don't know it because of jargon

Can you give an example of this?
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Balrog0 posted...

man I think I saw a related study that showed there were returns to authors who used more jargon/write in a less readable manner (in terms of... number of articles published? number of citations? I can't remember) but now I can't find it

I think I know what you're talking about:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5043322/
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I got the sense of this from seeing abstracts for seminars posted every week in the elevator at work.

We all work in the same building towards the same overall goal and I work with a group of people I would consider geniuses, but if we had a gun put to our heads we still wouldn't be able to give a tl;dr explanation for what somebody in a different wing was working on, unless they explained it in casual conversation

Oh yeah the relevancy to this topic is that those abstracts are usually taken straight out of papers they submitted or a combination of multiple papers
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I'd say a lot of this is because journals are trending towards being more subspecialised over time.

Another thing to keep in mind is that even if the articles are harder to read, they are WAY more accessible to people. It's no good for the article to be clearly written if nobody can read it without finding a physical copy of the journal in a university library somewhere. The overall trend towards access outweighs this, imo.
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It's because schools spend 16 or so years repeatedly teaching us that using big fancy words and being as dagblasted boring as possible gets you a better grade.
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in other news scihub got sued offline again
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P4wn4g3 posted...

COVxy posted...

We have disparate fields who are often studying the same exact phenomenon, but don't know it because of jargon

Can you give an example of this?

This is true, some algorithms have been rediscovered multiple times like Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) which was discovered by biologists before machine learning researchers.

I'm not sure how much overlap something like pure geometry might have with chemistry for example though except in fringe cases like the LDA above.
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IllegalAlien posted...

P4wn4g3 posted...

COVxy posted...

We have disparate fields who are often studying the same exact phenomenon, but don't know it because of jargon

Can you give an example of this?

This is true, some algorithms have been rediscovered multiple times like Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) which was discovered by biologists before machine learning researchers.

I'm not sure how much overlap something like pure geometry might have with chemistry for example though except in fringe cases like the LDA above.

I was just asking for an example. What is the story with LDA?
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And sometimes you get clowns like this medical researcher discovering high school math

https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/

Rexdragon125 posted...

And sometimes you get clowns like this medical researcher discovering high school math

https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/

This is just damn stupid. Anybody who works in pharmacology or biochemistry should be well aware of AUC and integration. It doesn't make sense to me that this got published.
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P4wn4g3 posted...

IllegalAlien posted...

P4wn4g3 posted...

COVxy posted...

We have disparate fields who are often studying the same exact phenomenon, but don't know it because of jargon

Can you give an example of this?

This is true, some algorithms have been rediscovered multiple times like Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) which was discovered by biologists before machine learning researchers.

I'm not sure how much overlap something like pure geometry might have with chemistry for example though except in fringe cases like the LDA above.

I was just asking for an example. What is the story with LDA?

I'm not sure there's a story really but some biologists proposed LDA before Ng did. Ng's work has some absurd number of citations in the machine learning literature.

The well known Belief Propagation algorithm was also discovered multiple times.

I think it happens a lot in machine learning since ML is a mix of so many well established fields which have their own notation and interests that it can be hard to do a literature survey.
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