by Clarissa Brincat

Europeans and North Americans are WEIRD. No, I’m not trying to start a culture war. I’m just quoting behavioural scientists. A little over a decade ago, they began to realize that most psychological studies did not paint an accurate picture of the global population. More often than not, participants lived in countries that were Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. The acronym WEIRD was born.

WEIRD is not a one-off. Scientific papers are filled with acronyms — some little more than strings of letters, others carefully constructed to form recognizable words, like GANDALF (Gas AND Absorption Line Fitting) and MIAOW (Minimum Inertia Adaptive Optics Widget). Acronyms can save space and occasionally inject humor into otherwise technical writing. But when left undefined, as often happens, they can render research opaque, sowing confusion even among specialists and further distancing the public from scientific work.

“There is an enormous number of acronyms in science and technology — around a million,” said Helge Kragh, a historian of science who recently published a paper on the rise of acronym use in physics and astronomy. Science is not unique. Fields like law and politics are also dense with acronyms. But in science, they have been especially overused.

The phenomenon was essentially unknown before World War II. It was then that acronyms began to proliferate in military research, RADAR (Radio Detection and Ranging) and LORAN (Long Range Navigation) among them. These coded terms appealed to defense officials not only for their efficiency but also for the secrecy they afforded. After the war, the habit spread across other scientific fields. By 1968, it had grown so pervasive that an editorial in New Scientist lamented “acronymania,” describing it as a kind of contagious disease.

The popularity of acronyms in science may be a holdover from the era of print journals, where space was at a premium, said Adrian Barnett, a statistician and meta-science researcher at the Queensland University of Technology. “But now everything is online, you don’t have to be saving space.”

Acronym overuse, he added, is not limited to academic papers. “It also happens in bureaucracy: ethics applications, grant applications.”

Confusion and multiple meanings

In a 2020 study, Barnett and his colleague Zoe Doubleday analyzed 24 million scientific article titles and 18 million abstracts published between 1950 and 2019, tracking trends in acronym use. They found that acronyms have become steadily more common over the past six decades. But most don’t stick. Of the more than one million unique acronyms identified, only a tiny fraction — about 0.2% — were used frequently. Nearly 80% appeared fewer than 10 times across the literature.

Because most acronyms are not widely understood, they can hinder communication among researchers. This drives a “knowledge-ignorance paradox”: Even as individual scientists know more, the scientific community as a whole may understand less, because new findings are not clearly shared.

Another downside is that many acronyms are not unique, so the same abbreviation can mean different things, even within a single field, said Kragh. For example, in medicine, the acronym UA has 18 different meanings. ED can refer to an emergency department, an eating disorder, or erectile dysfunction. “There is a danger of clinical mix-ups,” Barnett said. “What if ED is written in a patient’s notes without context? Could someone end up getting an unwanted dose of Viagra?”

“Two different studies may use the same acronym name,” said Donald A. Redelmeier, a physician-researcher at the University of Toronto and a co-author of a 2006 paper on acronym-named randomized trials, known as the ART in Medicine study. “For example, the acronym HEART has been used for more than a dozen separate trials,” he said.

Acronyms can also make research less accessible to the public. “The frequent use of acronyms, many of them strange and obscure, makes some scientific communication simply too difficult to understand for non-specialists, and especially for people outside the scientific community,” Kragh said.

In his book The Upside of Irrationality, the Duke University behavioral scientist Dan Ariely writes that acronyms “confer a kind of secret insider knowledge” and “help keep other ideas from entering the inner circle.”

Patients can feel that exclusion most acutely. Those trying to understand a frightening diagnosis often confront a “wall of jargon and acronyms,” Barnett said, adding that publicly funded research should be understandable to the people who pay for it.

In clinical trials, acronyms can also invite overstatement. “An acronym may contain too much hype,” said Redelmeier. “For example, the PROMISE trial was not promising and terminated early.”

Inside jokes

For all their drawbacks, “acronyms are really indispensable,” Kragh said. It seems natural to use the term LASER rather than the unwieldy “light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation.” In fact, terms like LASER, RADAR, and DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) have become so commonplace that many people no longer recognize them as acronyms at all, he said.

Acronyms are especially useful in high-pressure settings such as the emergency department, where time is limited, Barnett said. They are also helpful when discussing clinical trials, many of which have short, easy-to-remember names such as REACH, INTERACT, and RECOVERY. “For instance, you can just say, ‘No, that didn’t happen in REACH, it happened in INTERACT,’” he said.

Humor, it seems, is another reason scientists keep creating acronyms.

“There is a long tradition in physics and astronomy to have fun with names and to make jokes,” Kragh said. “Many of the longer and weirder acronyms were created because the scientists thought it was funny.” He pointed to ABRACADABRA (A Broadband/Resonant Approach to Cosmic Axion Detection with an Amplifying B-field Ring Apparatus) as one example. “They could have chosen any acronym and a much shorter one, but they saw that ABRACADABRA was a funny one.”

The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics maintains a webpage cataloguing similar examples, including BIGASS (Bright Infrared Galaxy All Sky Survey) and SHIT (Super Huge Interferometric Telescope).

The trend is not limited to physics and astronomy. Chemists, too, have produced gems like SECSY (Spin Echo Correlated Spectroscopy) and FART (Flavor Analysis and Recognition Transformer).

And clinical researchers are not immune either. “There is a competition in randomised trials to come up with the daftest name,” said Barnett. “My colleagues got the PHARLAP trial, which was a famous Australian horse and made them very happy.”

Sometimes acronyms are purposely devised to reinforce a message. Take WEIRD. “We coined the acronym as a kind of consciousness-raising device,” anthropologist Joseph Henrich told The Harvard Gazette. The goal of the acronym was “to remind people that researchers in particular use subjects in their experiments who are typically psychologically unusual and that they couldn’t readily generalize to everyone around the world from studying this one peculiar group.”

There are also more pragmatic reasons why scientists strive to come up with a memorable acronym. In a 2006 study, Redelmeier and his colleagues found that acronyms may improve a trial’s likelihood of being cited.

A later study in 2014 reported a similar trend, noting that papers with “good acronyms” in their titles were more likely to be published in journals with a higher impact factor (although they noted that the pattern in the data lacked statistical significance). Bibliometric measures of academic output are closely tied to funding success, the authors noted.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a research project in need of funds must be in search of a terrific acronym,” an editorial in Nature Physics observed in 2023.

Easy fixes

Barnett sees the overuse of acronyms as a relatively minor problem compared with broader issues in science, such as fraud. Nonetheless, he argues for restraint in their use. If you’re going to use acronyms, stick to the well-established ones like BMI and DNA, he said. “Don’t ever use it for your main idea, because you’re really undercutting what you’re trying to communicate.” He recalled reading a paper on research misconduct that repeatedly used the acronym FFP for falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism. “It’s better to just use the words.”

Barnett envisions simple fixes for online publishing, such as a “no acronyms” toggle at the top of the page that you could switch on to expand all acronyms. Or a tool that reveals full terms when you hover over acronyms.

In group settings, he said, he makes a point of asking about acronyms he doesn’t understand. “If I don’t understand it, there’s probably at least one other person who doesn’t either.”

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