why being scientifically conscise just makes sense

In a quote often credited to Albert Einstein, the famous scientist quips that if you can’t explain a concept to a six year old, you clearly don’t understand it yourself. Now, it may take a very bright six year old to truly comprehend certain concepts, but the larger point is perfectly valid and can be easily proven by analyzing the tactics of many snake oil salespeople hiding behind buzzword salads to obscure the fact that they’re just making things up on the spot. If you truly understand something, you should be able to come up with a very straightforward way to summarize it, as it was done here in a brilliant display of exactly this kind of concept. But sadly, scientists are really bad at straightforward titles for their most important units or work, their papers. Countless math, physics, computer science, and biology papers have paragraph-length titles so thick with jargon that they look as if they were written in another language entirely. And that carries a steep price, as a recent study analyzing citations of 140,000 scientific papers over six years shows.

You see, publishing a paper is important but it’s just half the work. The second crucial part of a scientist’s work is to get that paper cited by others in the field. The more prominent the journal, the more chances for citations, and the more citations, the more important the research is seen which means speaking gigs and potential applications for fame and profit. But as it turns out, it’s not just the journal and the work itself that matters. Shorter titles are objectively better and yield more citations because scientists looking at long, complicated titles get confused and won’t cite the research, unsure if anything in it actually applies to them. Quality of the work aside, the very fact that other experts can’t tell what you’re going on and on about is bad for science, leading to even more people doing the same work from scratch. To truly advance, science needs to build on previous work and if the existing work seems to be an odd fragment of alien gibberish at first glance, no one will review it further. So next time you write a scientific paper, keep its title short, sweet, and to the point. Or no one will read it, much less cite it as important to the field.