Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden.
Elife. 2017 Sep 5;6:e27725. doi: 10.7554/eLife.27725.
Clarity and accuracy of reporting are fundamental to the scientific process. Readability formulas can estimate how difficult a text is to read. Here, in a corpus consisting of 709,577 abstracts published between 1881 and 2015 from 123 scientific journals, we show that the readability of science is steadily decreasing. Our analyses show that this trend is indicative of a growing use of general scientific jargon. These results are concerning for scientists and for the wider public, as they impact both the reproducibility and accessibility of research findings.
报告的清晰性和准确性是科学过程的基础。可读性公式可以估计文本的阅读难度。在这里，在一个由 1881 年至 2015 年间从 123 种科学期刊发表的 709,577 篇摘要组成的语料库中，我们表明科学的可读性在稳步下降。我们的分析表明，这种趋势表明普遍使用科学行话的情况越来越多。这些结果不仅对科学家，而且对更广泛的公众都令人担忧，因为它们会影响研究结果的可重复性和可及性。
