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Narod | Current Oncology
After controlling for ds, rd, an interaction term for ds/cs, performance status, age, and cell type, cs was not an independent predictor of either pfs or os.
That ungainly sentence, with its 7 acronyms (5 that
are different), is taken straight from the abstract of a paper published
in the Journal of Clinical Oncology in March 2015: “Does
aggressive surgery improve outcomes? Interaction between preoperative
disease burden and complex surgery in patients with advanced-stage
ovarian cancer: an analysis of gog 182”1.
The rest of the paper uses even more acronyms, which, in our opinion,
make it close to unreadable—or at the very least, unpleasant to read.
That feeling of unease prompted us to send a note to the editor of the
journal, pleading for greater consideration of its readers with respect
to the excessive use of acronyms. The literature contains many other
examples, and the use of acronyms varies from journal to journal......
REFERENCESWe understood better what was going after we read Daniel Kahnemann’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow, wherein he discusses the internal competition in the brain4: Acronyms require an unnecessary investment of intellectual energy, which competes with the understanding of the main message. That is, either you focus on translating the acronyms or on understanding the sentence.
1. Horowitz NS, Miller
A, Rungruang B, et al. Does aggressive surgery improve outcomes?
Interaction between preoperative disease burden and complex surgery in
patients with advanced-stage ovarian cancer: an analysis of gog 182. J Clin Oncol 2015;33:937–43.
2. Kressel HY. Herding bees: restricting overuse of abbreviations in biomedical literature. Radiology 2013;266:372–3.
3. Berlin L. tac: aoitromja? (The acronym conundrum: advancing or impeding the readability of medical journal articles?). Radiology 2013;266:383–7.
5. Shiffrin RM, Nosofsky RM. Seven plus or minus two: a commentary on capacity limitations. Psychol Rev 1994;101:357–61.
6. Mack C. How to write a good scientific paper: acronyms [editorial]. J Micro Nanolithogr MEMS MOEMS 2012;11:040102.
7. Cheng TO. Acronymophilia: the exponential growth of the use of acronyms should be resisted. BMJ 1994;309:683–4.
8. Jacobs IJ, Menon U,
Ryan A, et al. Ovarian cancer screening and mortality in the UK
Collaborative Trial of Ovarian Cancer Screening (ukctocs): a randomised controlled trial. Lancet 2016;387:945–56.
9. Lee JH, Cragun D, Thompson Z, et al. Association between ihc and msi testing to identify mismatch repair–deficient patients with ovarian cancer. Genet Test Mol Biomarkers 2014;4:229–35.
10. McGill-Franzen A, Allington RL. Handbook of Research on Reading Disabilities. New York, NY: Routledge; 2010.
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