Jargon use in Public Understanding of Science papers over three decades

Abstract

Public Understanding of Science is an interdisciplinary journal serving the scholarly community and practitioners. This article reports an analysis of the readability and jargon in articles published in Public Understanding of Science throughout its almost three decades of existence to examine trends in accessibility to diverse audiences. The accessibility of Public Understanding of Science articles published in 1999/2000 (47), 2009 (49) and 2019 (65) was assessed in terms of readability and use of jargon. Readability decreased and use of jargon increased between 1999 and 2000 and the two following decades for empirical and non-empirical papers, and all parts including the abstracts. An analysis of rare words shows that most are not part of the general academic vocabulary or disciplinary jargon, but rather words that appeared only in one article. Public Understanding of Science has moved away from everyday language. This does not mean it is incomprehensible to its scholarly readership, but may have consequences to other audiences such as practitioners.

User-Centred Design of a Final Results Report for Participants in Multi-Sensor Personal Air Pollution Exposure Monitoring Campaigns

“…An R script was written to generate the final uniform reports to all participants for all participating cities [50]. QA/QC steps to remove outliers with extremely high concentrations (over 240 µg/m 3 ) were performed for PM data following predetermined criteria of consecutively occurring measurements, as reporting these types of erroneous results could have been worrying for the participants.…”

“…According to Albers [24], a complex communication situation should include the proper amount of information to maximise the communication output. In addition, jargon should be avoided in communicating scientific results to the public to ensure comprehension and readability for a wider audience [50] which is why the comprehension of the text in the report had to be tested amongst the participants.…”

User-Centred Design of a Final Results Report for Participants in Multi-Sensor Personal Air Pollution Exposure Monitoring Campaigns

“…According to Albers [ 24 ], a complex communication situation should include the proper amount of information to maximise the communication output. In addition, jargon should be avoided in communicating scientific results to the public to ensure comprehension and readability for a wider audience [ 51 ], which is why the comprehension of the text in the report had to be tested amongst the participants.…”

Looking back and looking ahead

“…While articles published in Public Understanding of Science are easily accessible and there have been several analyses of them already (e.g. Baram-Tsabari et al, 2020; Bauer and Howard, 2012; Gerber et al, 2020; Guenther and Joubert, 2017; Suerdem et al, 2013), information about submissions and their processing by the editorial team is not public. Rather than elaborating on our published articles, I use the opportunity of this editorial to share some statistical information about the number of submissions per year, their geographical origin, times to decisions, and acceptance rates.…”