Acronym acrimony: glut of abbreviations ‘hindering understanding’

An epidemic of acronyms is turning journal articles into alphabet soup, with authors combining almost every conceivable grouping of letters in a misguided drive to make their work more intelligible.

An analysis of 70 years of scholarly publishing has found more than 1.1 million unique abbreviations embedded in the titles and abstracts of almost 25 million papers. Half of them were used fleetingly, and 30 per cent only once.

Some of the 2,000 or so abbreviations in common usage proved no less mystifying. Many sported multiple meanings, including six of the 20 most popular ones. They included OR (“odds ratio” or “operating room”), MS (“multiple sclerosis” or “mass spectrometry”) and US (“United States”, “ultrasound” or “urinary system”).

The analysis, published in the journal eLife, found that the concentration of acronyms – defined for the purposes of the study as words in which half or more of the characters were upper-case letters – had more than tripled in article titles and multiplied tenfold in abstracts.

“These increases have happened despite the word and character limits that many journals place on the length of titles and abstracts,” the paper notes. “New acronyms are too common, and common acronyms are too rare.

“Acronyms are not the biggest current problem in science communication, but reducing their use is a simple change that would help readers.”

Co-author Zoë Doubleday said there was an assumption that abbreviations made papers easier to understand, so long as they were spelt out initially. “That often doesn’t help,” said Dr Doubleday, a marine ecologist at the University of South Australia.

“These papers are so dense. People tend not to read them linearly; you pick different parts you want to read. You come across the acronyms and then you’re flicking back and forth trying to remember what they mean. It’s another thing to add to the cognitive load when you’re already thinking hard.”

She said acronym use was largely “cultural” but also encouraged by the explosion and diversification of knowledge, with students automatically adopting what they saw in published papers or their supervisors’ practices: “We tend to emulate what’s come before us.” 

The analysis found that three-letter acronyms – which the authors jokingly dubbed “TLAs” – were more popular than abbreviations with two or four characters. Of 17,576 possible combinations of three upper-case letters in the English alphabet, 94 per cent had been used at least once.

Two-letter acronyms are equally problematic, the paper suggests, citing a 2019 study that identified 36 “possible meanings and potential misunderstandings” of the abbreviation “UA”.

They ranged from medical interpretations such as “umbilical artery”, “unstable angina” and “uric acid” to usages from broader walks of life – including “urban area”, “user agreement”, the chemical “uranyl acetate”, the clothing brand “Under Armour” and institutions such as the “University of Antwerp”.

Dr Doubleday said possible measures to reduce acronym use included capping them to a set number per paper, banning them from abstracts or titles and maintaining a database of universally recognised permissible abbreviations.

The paper says another possibility, “software permitting”, is for journals to offer two versions of the same paper – one with acronyms and one without – so that readers can “select the version they prefer”.

But the best remedy is for scientists to desist, it adds. “We suggest a second use for DNA: do not abbreviate.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com