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• RE: NYTimes.com: Are You Confused by Scientific Jargon? So Are Scientists April 10, 2021
  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
• Re: NYTimes.com: Are You Confused by Scientific Jargon? So Are Scientists April 10, 2021
  Hard agree. And I don’t know too many academic disciplines that aren’t working to make some research in their field publicly accessible. But that’s different from saying that specialist work should be accessible to non-specialist readers. Karin ***************** Karin Wulf Executive
• Re: NYTimes.com: Are You Confused by Scientific Jargon? So Are Scientists April 10, 2021
  I'm 100% with you Joe. As a librarian, I've spent my career careening through the literatures of almost every field. It's fine that I can't understand them all. Tressie McMillian Cottom speaks to this in another way in her most recent piece in essaying : "Had I been writing for a much broader
• Re: NYTimes.com: Are You Confused by Scientific Jargon? So Are Scientists April 10, 2021
  For the record, in my Ph.D. thesis I formulated a new theory of the nature of scientific language. It turned out to be a Luther moment, in that it implied that what my committee taught was false. Much controversy followed. I was lucky to escape with the degree. Very funny in retrospect but at
• Re: NYTimes.com: Are You Confused by Scientific Jargon? So Are Scientists April 10, 2021
  Amusingly I do not know what you are saying because I do not understand what "margins" means in this context. As for reproducibility, only experts who know the language can do that. I suspect lack of specificity is a much bigger problem. Journal articles are not designed to convey the detailed
• Re: NYTimes.com: Are You Confused by Scientific Jargon? So Are Scientists April 10, 2021
  The DeBakey sisters spent their long, illustrious careers in the service of getting scientists to be better writers. That’s a real problem. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5098583/ But they understood the needs of different audiences and they were primarily concerned with
• Re: NYTimes.com: Are You Confused by Scientific Jargon? So Are Scientists April 10, 2021
  I hold a minority position on this, but, hey!, whoever wanted to be popular? I think the Times article is ridiculous. Measuring citations along a single axis of readability, whatever that is, is too simple. The real problem is in the expectation that scientists should have a popular audience.
• RE: NYTimes.com: Are You Confused by Scientific Jargon? So Are Scientists April 10, 2021
  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. From: osi20...@googlegroups.com
• Re: NYTimes.com: Are You Confused by Scientific Jargon? So Are Scientists April 10, 2021
  Academic writing and reporting research findings are two different things. Science has specialized language to talk about specific things for which general language has no words. That much impenetrability is necessary. David On Apr 10, 2021, at 2:22 PM, Glenn Hampson
• Re: NYTimes.com: Are You Confused by Scientific Jargon? So Are Scientists April 10, 2021
  Reminds me of a cute bit in Stanislaw Lem's The Futurological Congress (1971). There is so much scholarship available in the future that researchers refer to key ideas not by jargon, but by numbers. They do this in presentations to save time, reading out loud like: "1, 673, 22, and therefore 78."
• RE: NYTimes.com: Are You Confused by Scientific Jargon? So Are Scientists April 10, 2021
  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. [image: Diagram, text Description automatically generated] From: David Wojick Sent: Saturday, April 10, 2021
• Re: NYTimes.com: Are You Confused by Scientific Jargon? So Are Scientists April 10, 2021
  It is probably a law of communication that the less specialized the language, the more people can read it. But in many cases this makes the findings less precise, which may explain why the more specialized findings get more grants. Communication versus precision. David On Apr 10, 2021, at 1:45
• NYTimes.com: Are You Confused by Scientific Jargon? So Are Scientists April 10, 2021
  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.
• Re: more reading April 7, 2021
  I am glad somebody is indexing it because it needs to be findable. David On Apr 7, 2021, at 3:27 PM, Collins, Nina K wrote:  My brief observations: 1. Dimensions pulls in content from Crossref as well as other curated sources, including PubMed and DOAJ. (Also from
• RE: more reading April 7, 2021
  My brief observations: 1. Dimensions pulls in content from Crossref as well as other curated sources, including PubMed and DOAJ. (Also from UGC Journal List Group II? Anybody familiar with this resource?) 2. The requirements for indexing content in Dimensions: content must use