The University of Chicago’s biology department teaches its students the foundations of science in a brilliant and innovative way. Diverging from the common high school method of mindlessly pushing through a textbook—merely shoving facts down students’ throats—the department harnesses the educational power of professional research papers. Utilizing these primary sources of literature facilitates scientific education in two main ways: 1) It offers students a method of understanding how research is conducted, immersing them into a world of inquiry without actually being in the lab, and 2) It teaches students how to read professional research papers.
One would probably think that both benefits are very valuable, and one would be correct in thinking so. But why does the latter benefit even exist? Why do we have to learn how to read professional research papers?
Excessive jargon, complex sentences, and intricate graphs and pictures that have little explanation make many research papers too difficult to understand unless one has years of background and has developed the capacity to single out dispensable, false, or ambiguous information. The reasons for the unnecessary complexity of research papers are twofold. For one, scientific publications are stringent on their page limits, word limits, and figure limits. These regulations encourage researchers to fit years of work into two or three pages, thereby leaving less room for explanations of explanations. But researchers themselves are to blame as well. Many researchers, in some sort of arrogant mind-set, attempt to impress others with complex language and jargon that portray their knowledge as more exclusive.
The fact that research is not readily accessible to the general public seems extremely contradictory to the aim of science, a discipline that promotes collaborative effort in understanding, and the easy flow of information to facilitate that understanding. Researchers write papers to provide far-reaching presentations of ideas so that others can build upon, refute, or confirm them. What’s the point of scientific endeavor if only an extremely small subset of the population can truly understand and participate in the intellectual discussion, while the rest of the population must wait for journalists who are inexperienced in scientific research to give dumbed-down reports of breakthroughs? Is that really how knowledge should permeate the country?
There is some hope, however. Science publications like the Scientific American show us that it is possible to bring complex ideas to the public without dumbing the material down. TED, the global conferences focused on ideas worth spreading, has also shown us that the general population can access technical ideas if those ideas are delivered in a simpler manner. For years now, creative, successful academics have given TED talks that condense years of research into less than 18 minutes, and their concepts are readily understood by everyone who hears them online. Granted, the audience for TED talks is different from that of academic research papers, but we can still learn from TED: There is a strong correlation between the successful spreading of ideas and the simplicity of conveyance.
For some reason, it has become commonplace to think that complexity equals quality. We must realize that this is not the case; simplicity is the key to collective intellectual development. Science should not be exclusive. Solutions to this unwarranted and unnecessary complexity could include publications relaxing their stringent content restrictions, but scientists should also take simplicity into their own hands.
I wait for the day when high school students can read professional research papers and subsequently build upon or refute what they have read with the confidence and understanding of a professional researcher. I wait for the day when researchers can publish groundbreaking papers on news media outlets for the world to read. That would not only embody true science, but it would also significantly improve the standard of our nation’s scientific education for years to come.
Suchin Gururangan is a first-year in the College.
Dear Author,
I think you’ve written a pretty eloquent article on a very misguided position. There are vast differences between an academic work in any subject, and the distilled version that goes into a TED talk, newspaper article, or a best-selling novel. It is not arrogance that encourages academics to use discipline-specific “jargon;” instead, it is the efficiency and accuracy attained by using precise language.
Think about the following situation: as a bio major (sounds like you’re in AP-5, no?), I’m sure you’re intimately familiar with the definition of an “enzyme.” Would it not strike you as redundant and silly if your text books—and the articles that you read—defined enzymes as “protein catalysts,” proteases as “protein-cleaving protein catalysts,” and then protease inhibitors as “substances that reduce the effectiveness of protein-cleaving protein catalysts?” You can see how quickly the definitional method you seem to espouse degrades into absurdity, even when looking at exceedingly simple terminology. The absurdity is compounded when attempting to define complex theories that underlie entire fields in simple, easily intelligible, 10th-grade level English. The fact of the matter is that these articles are directed at the peers of the authors– namely, at individuals who have advanced degrees and/or are highly specialized in a given field. UChicago is giving you the opportunity to advance your own education and stand on par with the authors of these journals; you are begging them to come down to your level.
In addition to misunderstanding the justification for using complex language, I believe you have misinterpreted the fundamental purpose of research papers. There is a whole field devoted to condensing landmark scientific discoveries (and even banal scientific discoveries) into plain English. This field is called scientific journalism. Scientific articles, on the other hand, present raw data and conclusions for evaluation and criticism on the part of other researchers. You don’t seem to realize how different those two things are. Conclusions drawn from raw data can be variable, can exist at all levels of complexity, and most of all, they can be wrong. Those “intricate graphs and pictures,” which are conspicuously absent from TED talks and the NYT Science pages, are the single most important part of a paper. Judgments can be false, but in scientific articles, the data is there for reevaluation and criticism. It does no one ANY service to present simple conclusions (many of which are incomplete, many of which have no apparent relevance, and some of which are incorrect) in dumbed-down speech for the consumption of general public. Most (not all, but most) research papers do not present groundbreaking, earth-shattering, call-the-President conclusions; instead, they offer carefully designed experiments predicated on the works of previous authors, and attempt to make some modest contribution to their field. Sometimes they fail. Part of why the peer-review system is in place is to vet the bad experiments and poor analyses BEFORE they are amplified into “Scientists find cure for cancer!” or some analogous bad-scientist headline.
I have to get back to work, but I strongly advise you to reconsider your shallow, self-centered position regarding the state of science. Sure, it has some issues (well-known professors have an easier time getting published than newcomers), but you have managed to touch on exactly none of them. Rather than thinking, “I don’t understand this, there must be something wrong with IT,” you should think, “how can I, as a burgeoning scientist* expand my knowledge so that I find these papers accessible?” And enjoy those papers. Because, like it or not, you have three more years of getting them crammed down your throat.
Sincerely,
Me.
*Doctor? Sounds like it might be doctor.