31 December 2020 13 353 Report

Have you heard of DNA? It stands for Do Not Abbreviate apparently. Jokes aside, it's the most widely used acronym in scientific literature in the past 70 years, appearing more than 2.4 million times.

The short form of deoxyribonucleic acid is widely understood, but there are millions more acronyms (like WTF: water-soluble thiourea-formaldehyde) that are making science less useful and more complex for society.

Here is an analysis of 24 million scientific article titles and 18 million abstracts between 1950 and 2019.

Article The growth of acronyms in the scientific literature

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