This is a set of web collections curated by Mark Graham using the Archive-IT service of the Internet Archive. They include web captures of the ISKME.org website as well as captures from sites hosted by IGC.org.These web captures are available to the general public.For more information about this collection please feel free to contact Mark via Send Mail ||||| If you've been keeping up with the latest in science news, you might have read a few weeks ago that gene and seizure interactions in something called VTA glutamatergic neurons impair sociability by downregulating Cbln1 - a key node in the expanding protein interaction network of autism genes. 
 
 Have we lost you? Don't feel too bad. Unless you're well-versed in genetics and neurology, you probably re-read that sentence a few times before moving on - a feature of science papers that, according to new research, has been slowly getting worse. 
 
 It's not just jargon that has become increasingly dense over the past century, according to a team of neuroscientists from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, but the language of science itself has also become more taxing to decipher. 
 
 To test whether published research has become harder to read over time, the researchers downloaded 707,452 biomedical articles from 122 journals in the science database PubMed, all produced between 1881 and 2015. 
 
 The papers' abstracts were then analysed according to two measures of readability: 
 
 the Flesch Reading Ease, which provides a score based largely on things like sentence length and the number of syllables per word 
 
 the New Dale-Chall Readability Formulae, which analyses text based on a general familiarity of words. 
 
 Readability tests such as these are often used to determine whether a text is appropriate for children and young adults at a particular stage of learning, with levels fine-tuned to match a grade or year level in the US. 
 
 Based on an average of annual scores, the researchers identified a steady decline in the readability of the abstracts in scientific papers over the past century, finding that more than 26 percent of the texts they analysed required a college graduate (tertiary) level of English to comprehend, up from about 16 percent in 1960. 
 
 This rise represented not only more field-specific jargon, such as the aforementioned "VTA glutamatergic neurons", but an increase in what the researchers called in-group scientific language, or 'science-ese' - words such as "robust", "underlying", or "furthermore". 
 
 Of course, one explanation for why science is getting harder to read could be that science itself is becoming more complex, requiring new words to describe more specific concepts. 
 
 But if that were that simple, the researchers would expect the jargon and science-ese to be more diverse than what they found, which suggests something else is going on. 
 
 The research has so far only analysed one field – biomedicine – and the results have yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, so we can't read too much into them just yet. But if they can be replicated with further research, the study could hint at an underlying 'tribalism' that is making science less accessible to the wider community. 
 
 On its own, jargon and 'in-group' language can be useful, speeding up communication and reducing the risk of misunderstanding. 
 
 But jargon can also have a habit of making it harder for outsiders to understand a piece of writing, and also act as a way to identify and control who is part of a community and who is not. 
 
 Not that it's the general public alone or those outside of a field who could benefit from more plain-speaking science – the researchers point out that scientists who rewrite their abstracts for a lay audience are better able to comprehend their own work. 
 
 They also suggest that writing more plainly could help address science's reproducibility crisis by improving the communication of the methods of previous studies. 
 
 As science writer Philip Ball points out in a column in Nature, one thing to keep in mind here is that tests designed to evaluate the reading levels of pre-teen US school children might not clearly lend themselves to testing scientific literature. 
 
 But he added his own observation – not only is readability about the words in the story; it's about the words that are missing. 
 
 "As a regular reader of research papers, I am often staggered by their leaps of reasoning or omission of key details, especially when I discover that these gaps are no less real to experts," Ball writes. 
 
 He also suggests that papers could be improved by scientists learning to look outside of their field to find good role models. 
 
 "Why not encourage students to put down Nature and pick up Darwin, Dawkins or Dickens?" suggests Ball. 
 
 Good science can be held back without good communication, so taking a page from their favourite writer's book is something all scientists – and science writers – could certainly benefit from. 
 
 This research was published on the pre-print website bioRxiv. ||||| Modern scientific texts are more impenetrable than they were over a century ago, suggests a team of researchers in Sweden. It’s easy to believe that. 
 
 You can be confident, for example, that if you pick up a random copy of Nature (which has long prided itself on the relative accessibility of its papers), you may find sentences like this in the abstracts: 
 
 Here we show that in mice DND1 binds a UU(A/U) trinucleotide motif predominantly in the 3' untranslated regions of mRNA, and destabilizes target mRNAs through direct recruitment of the CCR4-NOT deadenylase complex. 
 
 But this type of jargon-heavy phrasing is not the only problem that neuroscientist William Hedley Thompson and his colleagues at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm are tackling in their analysis. They scoured more than 700,000 English-language abstracts published between 1881 and 2015 in 122 leading biomedical journals. Their study1, posted on the preprint server bioRxiv on 28 March, suggests that it’s not just the technical jargon that has been on the rise. 
 
 There has also, the authors say, been an increase in “general scientific jargon”: that is, multisyllable words that have non-technical meanings but have become part of the standard lexicon of the science paper. These words include ‘robust’, ‘significant’, ‘furthermore’ and ‘underlying’ — all familiar enough in daily use, but markedly more prevalent in the scientific literature. The words aren’t inherently opaque, but their accumulation adds to the mental effort involved in reading the text. 
 
 Fourth-grade readers 
 
 Thompson and his colleagues examined the texts using standard indicators of reading ease, which measure factors such as the number of syllables per word, the number of words in a sentence and the number of words in the paper not included in a predefined list of common words (the New Dale–Chall, or NDC, list). By these measures, the trends seem very clear: a steady and marked decline in readability since 1881. 
 
 You could argue over the technicalities of the study. The list of common words is measured against the comprehension skills of US fourth-graders — children aged nine and ten — and its applicability to the scientific literature is not clear, points out Yellowlees Douglas at the University of Florida in Gainesville, author of The Reader’s Brain (Cambridge University Press, 2015), a writing manual that bases its advice on neuroscience. More problematically, metrics such as syllable-counting are too simplistic: for example, they rate words such as ‘orange’ and ‘praxis’ as equivalent. 
 
 What’s more, says physicist Luís Amaral of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who has studied trends in scientific publications, the data from before 1960 are too sparse and variable to be very reliable, and the trends in the data from after 1960 are less clear. 
 
 Besides, Amaral says, distinguishing between technical and general jargon isn’t easy. And an increase in technical jargon is not wholly a bad thing: it can reflect the appearance of useful concepts and techniques in science. ‘Sequencing’ was probably not part of the scientific vocabulary before 1980, he says, but who would complain about its presence now? 
 
 However, the need for specialized terms cannot completely explain the increased impenetrability of modern scientific literature. 
 
 Thompson and his colleagues are probably right to pin some of that opacity on a habitual, almost ritualistic use of ‘power words’ such as ‘distinct’ and ‘novel’. But a focus on word-counting risks distracting from what really matters about good writing. 
 
 Tangled sentences 
 
 Short, common words can be used to write sentences that are awfully hard to understand, simply because of poor grammatical construction. This is the point of Douglas’s book: the reader expects to encounter concepts in a particular order, without having to search back for the right noun to go with a verb, or having to untangle intervening information-filled clauses. You can always look up jargon, but with a poorly constructed sentence you’re on your own. 
 
 And comprehensibility isn’t just about what a paper says, but also about what it leaves out. As a regular reader of research papers, I am often staggered by their leaps of reasoning or omission of key details, especially when I discover that these gaps are no less real to experts. 
 
 So how could the readability of scientific papers be improved? First, by recognizing that good writing doesn’t happen by magic. It can be taught — but rarely is. Douglas suspects that many first drafts of papers are written by junior members of a research team who, lacking any model for what good writing looks like, take their lead from what is already in the journals. And there “they see the jargon and complexity as markers of what passes as scientific writing”, she adds. Such self-reinforcing mimicry could certainly account for the trends highlighted by Thompson and his colleagues. 
 
 So where do you find good models of writing? Obviously, from good writers — not necessarily in the sciences, but anywhere2. There is hard evidence that sophisticated readers make sophisticated writers3. Why not encourage students to put down Nature and pick up Darwin, Dawkins or Dickens?
– Put off by the high-level mumbo-jumbo that proliferates in science journals? You're not alone, Swedish researchers have found. In a study published in the preprint server bioRxiv, William Hedley Thompson and his Karolinska Institute team checked out more than 700,000 English-language abstracts from nearly 125 biomedical journals from 1881 to 2015 and discovered technical jargon has been on the upswing—but it's not just profession-tied vernacular sneaking into the text. The researchers also found an uptick in "general scientific jargon," or longer words that aren't necessarily of scientific origin (e.g., "furthermore") that keep turning up in science papers and muddling comprehension. Per Science Alert, the researchers held the abstracts up to two readability yardsticks that looked at how many syllables words had, sentence length, and reader familiarity with the language. What they found, from 1881 onward, is that readability has declined steadily over the years, results they call "concerning" considering it means scientific findings are less accessible. But Philip Ball, writing for Nature, points out issues with the study, noting that the readability gauges used common words measured against US fourth-graders' comprehension, not that of adults; that some of the earlier data (pre-1960) may not have been terribly reliable; and that technical jargon isn't inherently bad if it eventually places more scientific words in our everyday vocabulary. What Ball thinks could help: researchers being exposed to more good writing that would inform their own documentation and make it clearer for readers. "Why not encourage students to put down Nature and pick up Darwin, Dawkins, or Dickens?" he asks. (UK bureaucrats were told to drop the jargon a few years back.)