You are providing the standard excuse. It is our job to advance knowledge. It is someone else's job to communicate it to a broader audience. It's just too bad that nobody is stepping up and doing that other job.
I don't buy it. In my experience, most scientific papers can easily be rewritten into simpler language. The act of trying to do so often catches mistakes - thereby immediately improving how well we are advancing knowledge. The resulting paper is easier to read. This makes it more likely to become better known. Both within its subfield, and in a broader audience.
The habit of doing this makes us better communicators. Which also helps academics in various other parts of their job. Including teaching the next generation.
Furthermore, easier to read papers are easier for science popularizers to understand. Which makes it more likely that the work will be popularized.
Yes, it is tempting for academics to deflect responsibility for their role in being understandable. But it is a mistake for them to do so. Their ability to communicate in an understandable way is their responsibility. The few that take up that responsibility benefit themselves.
I'm not saying it's someone else's job to communicate to a lay audience. Simply that a research paper doesn't have to be a self-contained device for doing that and accurately describing the research to people who already have a lot of background knowledge on the topic and methods.
I guess I will say that I have thought for a long time that serializing research into linear documents seems archaic at this point.
It would be nice if academics would move to BOTH publishing the technical write up, AND a more understandable write up of their interpretation of the result (in more detail than the one liner which is in all abstracts.)
The technical writeup is necessary. It's what spells out what they specifically claim to have done, and the specific results. "Specific" being highly technical and fundamental in the scientific community understanding the paper correctly. In particular, the in-depth statistics of many such papers is simply too complex for most of the population to understand, and that's fine. The technical write-up uses terms of art which do not mean what civilians read in them. (And while it's hard to do studies larger than this one, this is all the more essential in smaller studies.)
The interpretation would be useful because it's just plain dangerous to let your PR department write that. Even if they consult you. And it is interesting to focus on what the scientists themselves think they achieved. Both what they deliberately went for, and any ancillary result they think they notice. In this case in particular, they are very focused on this safety aspect, and they seem to not want to give too much attention to the efficacy aspect (which they probably did not plan for and is then suspect.)
You are providing the standard excuse. It is our job to advance knowledge. It is someone else's job to communicate it to a broader audience. It's just too bad that nobody is stepping up and doing that other job.
I don't buy it. In my experience, most scientific papers can easily be rewritten into simpler language. The act of trying to do so often catches mistakes - thereby immediately improving how well we are advancing knowledge. The resulting paper is easier to read. This makes it more likely to become better known. Both within its subfield, and in a broader audience.
The habit of doing this makes us better communicators. Which also helps academics in various other parts of their job. Including teaching the next generation.
Furthermore, easier to read papers are easier for science popularizers to understand. Which makes it more likely that the work will be popularized.
Yes, it is tempting for academics to deflect responsibility for their role in being understandable. But it is a mistake for them to do so. Their ability to communicate in an understandable way is their responsibility. The few that take up that responsibility benefit themselves.