The Growing Inaccessibility of Scientific Literature
Science Writing, Science Communication, and The Weird Language Gap of Research
Attending graduate school has been bizarre. I’m majoring in biostatistics, a major which I’ve found myself needing to explain after stating. It’s deeply niche, and not many folks outside academia know the term. And, honestly, not many people even need to know about the profession — it’s mathy work that supports scientists and health professionals — you likely won’t need to hire a biostatistician in an emergency (unless you happen to be a scientist with an approaching deadline and your data is looking weird).
It isn’t just the name of my major that’s specific and niche, though — it’s the entire way of speaking about it. Learning statistics feels like learning a new language, as does taking an epidemiology (disease science) class, as does learning to code in R, as does learning about health systems and policy. Much of the courses in graduate school revolve around wrapping one’s head around how to speak about the stuff we’re doing properly. In biostatistics, we can get points off homework for saying “significant”, “causes” or “indicates” in the wrong situation.
To better be prepared to communicate with professional scientists, this education is invaluable — but it causes a shift in one’s vocabulary that makes communication to non-scientists less digestible (and encourages them to say ‘one’s’ instead of something normal like “a person’s”).
The language of science makes science writing inaccessible and research dull (if not illegible) for the public. Frankly, we need to do better.
Scientifically Proven to Be Ineffective
Scientific language is specific and useful for scientists, but the problem arises when the audience isn’t only made up of scientists. Just like any other discipline, a little bit of extra vocabulary can go a long way in communicating well (e.g. FUBAR) between workers in the same field. But, when most disciplines transition to speaking with those outside their field, there’s a code switch. With scientists, code-switching does not occur when they write public-facing materials like papers on their recent experiments — more on that later.
Unless you’re also keen on the language code of science, scientific language is worse at being convincing than speaking in plain English. Despite this, people often use it to be more convincing. This training we go through to better communicate with other scientists or, in some cases, sound smarter, makes us worse at communicating with everyone, and only makes us sound tiresome to people who don’t have that code. It’s a bad habit to get into.
Scientists like to call this phenomenon the “Overkill Backfire Effect”, which is a slightly fancier way of saying “people prefer simple and easy explanations over complicated ones with annoying, flowery language.” When someone has a belief about something, and the only evidence to refute it sounds elitist or doesn’t sound like a real person wrote it, it reinforces their belief, which they have already created a concise system of in their head.
As an example, if you believed that the only thing that affects how many people get sunburns is the sun being out, I could not convince you by saying, “Well actually, there is an extant n-dimensional hypervolume of covariates at play here, including confounders, mediators, effect measure modifiers, and, really, you must create a directed acyclic graph to understand the systemic forces at play.” This lengthy, jargon-heavy sentence means a great deal to someone who knows what all of that means, but it would be far more effective if I just said, “Well, what about sunscreen use? I think there’s more stuff at play here in the system”.
Using “science-speak” in the wrong context sabotages a message. That effect doesn’t just bore the listener, or make debates less effective, it also creates a space for misinformation to flourish. When the good, truthful, unbiased science out there doesn’t capture attention, all bad (or well-meaning but wrong) actors have to do is write clickbait, lean on an engaging personality, or make their information easier to access than the content produced by scientists. If science doesn’t find a way to make content that rivals this, it will be outcompeted. It already has been.
Narrowing the Language Gap
When looking at written material, the divide between scientific language and a blog is huge, but it isn’t necessarily unfixable.
To make science more accessible, all scientists have to do is take inspiration from other writings — ya know, the stuff everyday average Joe’s read for fun.
To start, it would help if scientists wrote more like regular people. A lot of language used in science is very specific and by no means should we throw that out, it’s there for a reason. But, there’s also fluff present. Just because there is a massive difference between the terms significant and notable in science does not mean that we have to all collectively write like rich white men from Victorian England. Folks, it’s getting old. Darwin would forgive us for letting our language evolve past his era.
Cutting back on antiquated vocabulary, avoiding run-on sentences, and taking a moment to make sure it reads well might be enough to fix this. Science is more accessible when it doesn’t take several re-reads of a sentence to even understand what the writer was thinking.
Alternatively, scientists could take inspiration from the world of journalism with press releases. When corporations want to spread news about their organization, they create little press kits that make it easier for journalists to source images, quotes, etc. Press kits are used to share files with short important facts and useful marketing collateral so that the company doesn’t need to worry about how stories are spread. Ultimately, this helps spread the story in a way true to what the brand wants to say.
When a scientific paper is published, the addition of a “press kit” for writers and general audiences could have a similar, helpful effect. What I’m describing is the original purpose of the abstract section. But over the years this section has evolved to be more of a TLDR for scientists specifically. A paragraph that’s written so that everyone can get the TLDR version might be the missing piece we need. And, when this piece is written by the scientists who wrote the rest, there would likely be less of a risk of mistranslation.
The language in our field isn’t just a weird egghead quirk, it’s also a side-effect of the research publication game. Even when the language of a paper itself is understandable, it can be really difficult to access a full manuscript. Many publications make visitors buy access to their journals or access to individual papers. Then, the options are to either study science, study to be a scientist, or pay ~ $30 per article. This isn’t realistic for everyone.
Because of that, when publishing a scientific paper, researchers assume that the only people who will ever see that paper are other scientists. They write without code-switching because, frankly, why bother? What random reader will want to know about the preferred frequency of male cricket chirps in Southern California? How many people are really going to pay $30 to see how magnesium interacts with potassium in a rat’s bloodstream?
But sometimes they do and that matters.
Non-scientists read the papers. If not the whole paper, they skim the abstract sections, watch the news segments that talk about them, read Medium articles, or listen to influencers and podcasters that talk about them. Some may even just read the headlines and research titles and call it a day. But they’re looking. Shouldn’t we reward that curiosity?
If it’s on the internet, it’s public-facing. We all have to embrace that mentality in the digital age, or our information will be outcompeted by misinterpretations or falsehoods.
People are insatiably curious. We must do our part to ensure what we offer helps them land on the right discovery. We must treat public research papers like the public-facing materials they truly are. If we don’t shift science to meet these needs, we’re letting science continue to become more inaccessible.
