On simplicity in Science

It can be difficult for experts in any field to remember what it was like when they weren’t experts. Back when they were starting to learn about their specialisation from colleagues, books, courses, or just through trial and error. How did they learn things? The chances are that at least some of them were lucky enough to work alongside, or to be taught by, someone who was knowledgeable and could therefore explain things in a really clear and straightforward way. 

In STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects, as with every other subject, this is of critical importance. We have the responsibility not only of teaching our students, but also of constantly learning and keeping on top of recent developments ourselves. We also are increasingly being told by funding agencies such as the European Research Council to communicate our research to the general public [1]. Some journals require authors to include lay summaries [2], i.e. short explanations of the research, written in a way which is accessible to a non-specialist audience. Some grant agencies require the same [3]. As pointed out in this excellent article [4], writing a lay abstract allows the authors to reach a much broader audience - rather than just being able to communicate with other researchers in the same field, their abstract makes their work accessible to scientists in other fields (which may yield new and unexpected combinations of research topics), but also to the public and to policy-makers. This has the added benefit of raising the profile of their work, by improving their visibility. Of course, this is breaking with the tradition of the tediously written, wordy, overly complicated article writing style. 

Such developments are slowly being taken up by the research community and that’s great, but what about changing how journal articles are written? Or how research talks are presented? Just a thought (I’m looking at you, everyone who has ever fallen asleep during a talk). 

But do we know how to do this? And is there enough emphasis being placed on this in the everyday life of a STEM researcher? Are there any rewards for this? How it is seen depends on the work environment. Unfortunately, many group leaders see it as a necessary evil, something to keep the funding agencies happy, but which detracts from valuable research time and resources. We need to provide incentives for good, simple science communication. To give recognition to excellent communicators, to people engaging with audiences in an informative and creative way. I don’t want to add to the researcher’s already never-ending workload, but I do think that if we share our coolest research results in an accessible way with the public, there is likely to be more backing for STEM-supporting policy-makers. That, in turn, will lead to more funding, which will enable researchers to perform even more exciting research (and so my idealistic positive feedback cycle will go). 

[1] https://erc.europa.eu/managing-your-project/communicating-your-research 

[2] https://elifesciences.org/articles/25411

[3] https://grants.nih.gov/grants/plain_language_examples.htm

[4] http://www.pnas.org/content/112/12/3585