Does #SciComm Have a Place in Publications and Proposals?

A look at what the guidelines and a few studies say

Published in

MetaScientific

6 min readAug 29, 2023

Science communication (or #scicomm if you are on social media) is the art of making the technical language of academic discussion understandable for broader and more general audiences. It is an essential skill for academics who want to communicate with the public, whether it be appearing in the local news or explaining climate change to congress like Carl Sagan famously did in 1985.

But does it have a place in the main communications that drive research, namely publications and proposals? Looking at the guidelines given for both, it seems that yes, to a small degree there are places where researchers need to broaden their message.

Publications

For instance, the journal Nature has the following readability guidelines for authors who submit a manuscript. Note the emphasis I’ve added below:

“Nature is an international journal covering all the sciences. Contributions should therefore be written clearly and simply so that they are accessible to readers in other disciplines and to readers for whom English is not their first language. Thus, technical jargon should be avoided as far as possible and clearly explained where its use is unavoidable. Abbreviations, particularly those that are not standard, should also be kept to a minimum. The background, rationale and main conclusions of the study should be clearly explained. Titles and abstracts in particular should be written in language that will be readily intelligible to any scientist. Essential but specialized terms should be explained concisely but not didactically.

And going across the pond to the journal Science, here is the guidance they have on the abstract portion of author manuscripts:

“Abstracts of Research Articles should explain to the general reader why the research was done, what was found and why the results are important. They should start with some brief BACKGROUND information: a sentence giving a broad introduction to the field comprehensible to the general reader, and then a sentence of more detailed background specific to your study. This should be followed by an explanation of the OBJECTIVES/METHODS and then the RESULTS. The final sentence should outline the main CONCLUSIONS of the study, in terms that will be comprehensible to all readers…”

In top journals like Science and Nature that cover all sciences, the readership could extend to other disciplines, so authors have to keep that in mind. And because modern science is an interdisciplinary web, people from any discipline could be scanning PubMed abstracts looking for topics related their research. So even in discipline-specific journals, there might be some utility in avoiding too much jargon in the abstract.

Proposals

Similarly, in grant applications the guidelines often advise to keep the abstracts and summaries in general terms, since those parts might be seen by reviewers who are outside your field. For federal funding this also aligns with Federal Plain Language Guidelines related to the Plain Writing Act of 2010 that was meant to make government communications more accessible to the public (as noted by the NSF).

For NSF applications, the guidelines suggest not getting too far in the weeds in the 1-page Project Summary as follows:

The Project Summary should be informative to other persons working in the same or related fields, and, insofar as possible, understandable to a broad audience within the scientific domain. It should not be an abstract of the proposal.

Similarly, it might be a good idea to avoid too much detail in the Project Summary/Abstract of NIH applications, since you are limited to 30 lines of text and that text will appear as the description on the public view of your project on NIH RePORTER if it is funded. However, the guidelines aren’t too explicit about that:

“This section should be informative to other persons working in the same or related fields and understandable to a scientifically literate reader.”

The guidelines given in the ARPA-H Broad Agency Announcement for the Concept Summary portion of the 3-page Abstract are a bit more direct on this point:

“Describe the proposed concept with minimal jargon and explain how it addresses the topic area(s) of the BAA.”

Taking this a step further, the DoD Congressionally Directed Medical Research program applications uniquely requires a Lay Abstract in addition to a Technical Abstract. These programs use a two-tier review process that includes members of advocacy groups and the military, for whom the Lay Abstract would be useful. The following guidelines are given for the Lay Abstract:

“Describe the proposed concept with minimal jargon and explain how it addresses the topic area(s) of the BAA.”

What the studies say

So, will following these guidelines affect the success of a submission? I was able to dig up a few studies that touch on this question, but nothing that I could draw strong conclusions from.

In a 2022 study out of the Netherlands, a text analysis was performed on about 3,000 funding applications from various fields, including the abstract, project description, and CV [1]. They found that project descriptions and CVs with more complex and technical language were correlated positively with applications passing the first round of the selection process, but there wasn’t a very strong correlation in the final round of the selection process. As for the language of the abstract, this did not have any strong bearing on the success of proposals. It would also be difficult to say whether the findings would extend to the review processes used in the U.S. and other non-European countries.

A 2021 study by David Markowitz of the University of Oregon School of Journalism used text analysis to evaluate 10,000 abstract submissions to the conference of the International Communication Association [2]. This study found that those with more complex and technical language were more likely to be accepted.

In a 2019 study, Markowitz also did a text analysis of the public abstracts from nearly 20,000 NSF awards from between 2010 and 2018 [3]. He found that larger award amounts moderately correlated with longer abstracts that used less common words. However, it has to be noted that the public abstracts are different than the Project Summary part of the proposal, particularly in that the NSF does not request the abstracts until after the award decision has been made. So this study isn’t as useful as it may seem in telling us if there is any correlation between the use of jargon and the success of a proposal.

A 2023 study out of China also used text analysis to evaluate the writing styles of nearly 70,000 publication abstracts from the fields of Information Science and Library Science [4]. The study found that publications with higher citations and in the top journals of the fields tended to have higher lexical complexity and density.

In Summary: Milk Before Meat

Academic writing is practically synonymous with jargon, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. Technical language with very specific meanings can be extremely useful and efficient when you need to hash out complex ideas with others in your field. If used appropriately, it can help establish confidence with your audience when it is their language too. But if used inappropriately, like as a means to prove something, your audience will likely see through your attempts to overcompensate [5].

That said, I think it is best to follow proposal and publication guidelines, and keep the jargon and acronym usage in abstracts and summaries to minimum, where suggested. That is the first and possibly only part some readers will see, so make it easy to digest. But as you get into the main body (the meat) of proposals and publications, there is no need to hold back on the technical details, the jargon where appropriate, and acronyms. Just use as needed, and don’t overdo it. But even more important is that your narrative is organized well, understandable, and backed up by convincing data. There’s no debate on that part.

References