Research papers are becoming less readable

Researchers are proposing ways to make scientific texts clearer amid concerns that scholarly literature is getting harder to read. A recent analysis published in eLife evaluated abstracts of over 700,000 papers published in 123 biomedical and life sciences journals between 1881 and 2015. It found that as science gets more complex, so do the words used to describe it, and that papers have seen a rise in ‘general scientific jargon’, which includes words like ‘robust’ and ‘significant’.