Scientific language is the specialized style of writing and speaking that researchers use to communicate findings, build arguments, and establish credibility within their fields. It is defined by technical vocabulary, cautious phrasing, standardized structures, and conventions that have grown more complex over time. A study of more than 700,000 biomedical abstracts published between 1881 and 2015 found that readability has been steadily declining, driven largely by increasing use of general scientific jargon. That trend carries real consequences, not just for the public trying to make sense of research, but for scientists themselves trying to read work outside their own specialties.
How Scientific Writing Has Become Harder to Read
The perception that scientific papers are getting more opaque is not just nostalgia for simpler times. Researchers who analyzed that massive corpus of biomedical abstracts documented a clear, long-running decline in readability scores, with general scientific jargon accumulating year after year.1bioRxiv. The readability of scientific texts is decreasing over time This is not about domain-specific terms that have no everyday substitute, like “ribosome” or “tectonic plate.” It is about the creep of unnecessarily complex language that could be replaced by shorter, clearer alternatives but never is.
Even journals dedicated to bridging science and society have not been immune. A study of papers published in the journal Public Understanding of Science found that readability decreased and jargon use increased between the late 1990s and the two decades that followed, across both research articles and their abstracts.2PubMed. Jargon use in Public Understanding of Science papers over three decades A journal whose entire purpose is communicating science to broader audiences drifted away from everyday language over the very period when science communication became more urgent. The irony is hard to miss.
Several forces drive this. Fields generate new terminology as they discover new phenomena, which is legitimate. But researchers also absorb the verbal habits of their disciplines during training and reproduce them automatically. Dense, abstract prose signals membership in the community. It can also signal sophistication, even when the underlying idea is straightforward. The result is that scientific writing often optimizes for peer credibility at the expense of clarity.
The Building Blocks of Scientific Style
Scientific writing has a set of recurring features that distinguish it from almost any other form of prose. Understanding them helps explain both why the language works the way it does and where it creates friction.
The most recognizable structural convention is the format used for original research articles: an introduction laying out the question, a methods section describing what was done, a results section reporting the findings, and a discussion interpreting them. This format started appearing in the 1940s. By the 1970s, roughly 80 percent of original research papers had adopted it, and by the 1980s it was essentially the only pattern in use.3PubMed Central. The introduction, methods, results, and discussion (IMRAD) structure: a fifty-year survey The format is genuinely useful: it lets readers find exactly the part of the paper they need. But it also imposes a rigid logic on how research is narrated, and training in writing within this structure shapes how scientists think about communicating their work in any context.
Hedging is another defining feature. Scientific prose is packed with words like “may,” “suggests,” “appears to,” and “is consistent with.” Far from being vague or weak, hedging serves a precise rhetorical function. It allows writers to calibrate how strongly they stand behind a claim, acknowledge uncertainty honestly, and anticipate objections from skeptical readers.4Written Communication. Talking to the Academy The problem is that when these hedges pile up in public-facing communication, they can make solid findings sound tentative, giving audiences the impression that scientists do not know what they are talking about when in fact they are simply being careful.
The passive voice plays a similar double role. “The samples were analyzed” rather than “we analyzed the samples” was long taught as the default, creating an impression of objectivity by removing the researcher from the sentence. But research on academic prose has shown that passive constructions can also be used strategically to reveal a writer’s stance, not just to hide it.5Journal of Pragmatics. Revealing stance through passive voice A scientist writing “It was found that…” is making a rhetorical choice about emphasis, not merely following a rule. Many style guides now encourage the active voice in scientific writing, but the passive remains deeply embedded in the culture.
When Jargon Becomes a Barrier
Scientific jargon does not just confuse the general public. It confuses scientists working in other fields. Researchers who encounter unfamiliar specialized terms when reading outside their own domain face real cognitive obstacles, which means that the fragmentation of knowledge into increasingly narrow subfields is partly a language problem, not just a content problem.6ACL Anthology. Personalized Jargon Identification for Enhanced Interdisciplinary Communication
The effects on public audiences are more severe and better documented. Experiments have shown that jargon impairs people’s ability to process scientific information and that this impairment triggers a cascade of downstream effects: greater resistance to persuasion, heightened perception of risk, and lower support for adopting new technologies.7PubMed. Jargon as a barrier to effective science communication: Evidence from metacognition In other words, when the public reads a science-heavy message full of unfamiliar terms, they do not simply fail to understand it. They actively push back against it. The difficulty of processing the language makes the content feel less trustworthy, which is the opposite of what the jargon was presumably meant to convey.
This matters enormously for issues where public understanding shapes policy, from vaccination to climate change. Scientists who rely on the same vocabulary they use in journal articles when speaking to journalists, lawmakers, or community groups are often undermining their own message without realizing it.
Metaphors That Help and Hurt
Scientists lean heavily on metaphor and analogy when explaining their work, both to each other and to everyone else. DNA as a “blueprint,” the brain as a “computer,” natural selection as a competitive “arms race”: these figures of speech make abstract concepts graspable. But they also carry baggage. Metaphors shape reasoning. They determine which aspects of a phenomenon get emphasized and which get ignored, and they can lock in assumptions that persist long after the original comparison has outlived its usefulness.8PubMed Central. On the Problem and Promise of Metaphor Use in Science and Science Communication
The “blueprint” metaphor for DNA, for instance, implies a one-to-one mapping between gene and trait that modern genetics has long since abandoned. The “war on cancer” framing emphasizes aggression and defeat, which can shape both funding priorities and how patients understand their own treatment. These metaphors have both a theoretical and a practical dimension: they function as explanatory models, but they also guide technological development, influence policy, and reshape how people understand themselves.9Argumentation. Reconstructing Resistance: Pragmatic Argumentation Against Scientific Metaphor
A related issue arises from anthropomorphism and teleology in biological language. Saying a virus “wants to replicate” or a plant “seeks out” sunlight can be a useful shorthand, but it implies intentionality where none exists. Research has examined how this kind of language in biological explanations creates opportunities for misunderstanding cause-and-effect relationships, particularly in educational settings where students may take the intentional framing literally.10Science Education. Anthropomorphism and teleology in reasoning about biological phenomena
The Problem with Equations
Mathematical notation is a kind of scientific language unto itself, and its effects on communication are surprisingly measurable. A study of biology papers found that each additional equation per page in the main text was associated with about 28 percent fewer citations overall. The drop was driven almost entirely by non-theoretical papers citing equation-heavy work less often, at a rate of about 35 percent fewer citations per additional equation per page.11PubMed Central. Heavy use of equations impedes communication among biologists Theoretical papers still cited equation-dense work, but not enough to offset the broader avoidance.
This does not mean equations are bad science. It means they function as a language barrier within science itself. Important findings buried in dense mathematical formalism get read and built upon by fewer researchers than equivalent findings presented in more accessible ways. The practical implication is that scientists producing highly mathematical work may need to invest more effort in translating their key results into verbal summaries if they want that work to have influence beyond their immediate subfield.
English as Science’s Gatekeeping Language
The dominance of English in global science creates a two-tier system. Researchers whose first language is English participate in the international scientific conversation with a structural advantage that touches nearly every stage of their work. A large survey of scientists worldwide found that non-native English speakers require more time to read English-language papers, more time to write them, and more effort to proofread them. They are more likely to have papers rejected due to English writing quality and more likely to be asked to improve their English during the revision process.12PubMed Central. The manifold costs of being a non-native English speaker in science These individual disadvantages compound across a career, creating a cumulative drag on productivity and visibility for the majority of the world’s researchers.
The financial dimension is underappreciated. A study of Colombian doctoral students in biological sciences found that more than 90 percent of their published articles were in English, and that the cost of translation or editing services ranged from one-quarter to one-half of a doctoral monthly salary per article.13PLOS ONE. Disadvantages in preparing and publishing scientific papers caused by the dominance of the English language in science: The case of Colombian researchers in biological sciences About 43 percent reported having papers rejected or sent back for revision because of English grammar, and a third chose not to attend international conferences because of the requirement to present in English. These are not minor inconveniences. They are career-shaping constraints imposed by the language of science rather than its content.
Preliminary research has also raised the possibility that linguistic bias affects peer review itself. In one study, scholars were shown abstracts with identical scientific content but different levels of English quality. Although the results were not conclusive, the pattern suggested that reviewers may rate the scientific quality of work lower when the writing does not conform to standard academic English.14PubMed Central. Preliminary evidence of linguistic bias in academic reviewing If confirmed in larger studies, this would mean that the language of a paper is not just a vehicle for its science but a filter that independently affects how that science is judged.
Gender and Self-Promotion in Scientific Writing
How scientists describe their own work is not just a matter of personal style. It tracks with gender in ways that have measurable consequences. An analysis of more than six million articles found that women as both first and last author used positive framing words in about 10.9 percent of titles or abstracts, compared to 12.2 percent for articles involving a male first or last author. The gap was largest in high-impact clinical journals, where women were about 21 percent less likely to frame their findings in positive terms. Across all clinical journals, positive framing was associated with roughly 9 percent higher subsequent citations.15BMJ. Gender differences in how scientists present the importance of their research: observational study
The gender gap extends beyond the papers themselves to how scientists talk about their work publicly. Research on academic social media found that male authors’ likelihood of self-promoting their papers was about 28 percent higher on average than comparable female authors’, a disparity that appeared across all academic fields and was more pronounced among prolific women at top institutions publishing in high-impact journals.16Nature Communications. The gender gap in scholarly self-promotion on social media
Interestingly, the pattern does not always hold across every context. An analysis of grant proposals in life sciences found no evidence that men used more self-promotional language than women in the text of their applications, across multiple funding schemes.17Research Evaluation. Cross-sectional analysis of self-promotional language in texts of grant proposals across gender The mismatch between the findings in published papers and grant proposals suggests that the dynamics of self-promotion in scientific language are context-dependent, shaped by the norms and incentives of each setting rather than by a blanket gender difference in linguistic behavior.
Plain Language Summaries and the Push for Accessibility
Awareness that scientific language excludes people has driven a growing effort to create lay-friendly alternatives. Plain language summaries, often published alongside a technical paper or review, aim to convey the key findings in words a non-specialist can follow. Systematic reviews of the practice have found considerable work on developing summary formats that communicate findings to laypeople while retaining scientific accuracy.18PubMed Central. Plain language summaries: A systematic review of theory, guidelines and empirical research
The evidence that these summaries work is encouraging. In a randomized trial comparing a redesigned plain language summary of a Cochrane systematic review to the standard version, participants who received the new format answered more questions correctly about the benefits, harms, and quality of evidence: about 53 percent understood the key messages, compared to 18 percent with the standard version. The improvement held regardless of education level. Participants also found the new format more reliable, easier to navigate, and more useful for making decisions.19PubMed. A summary to communicate evidence from systematic reviews to the public improved understanding and accessibility of information: a randomized controlled trial
Some researchers have gone further, communicating science in Indigenous languages to reach communities that technical English writing leaves out entirely. One project developed an infographic explaining the mercury cycle in Mi’kmaw, coining or adapting terms to avoid the technical language known to hinder science communication.20FACETS. Indigenous-language communication as an opportunity for engagement in the aquatic sciences This kind of work treats the language barrier not as a problem that audiences need to overcome but as a responsibility that scientists need to address.
Scientific Language and the Reproducibility Problem
The reproducibility crisis in fields like psychology and neuroscience has many causes, but imprecise scientific writing is one of them. If a methods section does not describe a procedure clearly enough for another researcher to recreate it, reproducibility fails before anyone even tries the experiment. Research has argued that widespread failure to meet reporting standards, especially the norm of describing procedures completely, is a meaningful contributing factor to the crisis. The link between communication and reproducibility is direct: you cannot replicate what you cannot understand.21European Journal for Philosophy of Science. Double trouble? The communication dimension of the reproducibility crisis in experimental psychology and neuroscience
This is a case where the conventions of scientific language work against their own goals. Methods sections are supposed to be the most precise part of a paper, yet researchers often rely on shorthand, cite previous papers for procedural details rather than spelling them out, or use ambiguous terms that mean slightly different things in different labs. The pressure to keep papers short collides with the need for thorough description, and thoroughness usually loses.
How AI Is Reshaping the Words Scientists Use
Large language models have already left a visible mark on scientific prose. An analysis of more than 15 million biomedical abstracts indexed by PubMed found that the introduction of these tools led to an abrupt increase in the frequency of certain style words, and that by 2024, at least 13.5 percent of abstracts showed signs of having been processed with a language model. The researchers described the impact as unprecedented, surpassing even the vocabulary shifts caused by the COVID pandemic.22PubMed Central. Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications through excess vocabulary
A broader analysis across all academic disciplines found an even larger footprint. Using a set of 228 words that spiked sharply in frequency after 2022, researchers estimated that by 2025, about 57 percent of published articles showed some evidence of language-model influence, up from roughly 12 percent in 2023. The degree of influence varied widely, from subtle changes in word choice to text that appeared mostly or entirely generated by a model.23PubMed Central. The diffusion of large language models in published academic articles
This creates a paradox for scientific language. On one hand, language models could help non-native English speakers produce smoother prose, potentially leveling one of the playing field’s steepest tilts. On the other hand, if AI-polished text introduces a new kind of homogeneity, with every paper sounding as though it was written by the same machine, science loses something: the individual voice, the idiosyncratic phrasing, and the subtle signals about a writer’s level of confidence in their own claims. The long-term effects on how scientific arguments are constructed and received remain genuinely unknown.
What Scientific Names Carry
Scientific naming is one of the oldest and most formalized uses of scientific language, and it carries cultural weight that the system’s designers did not always intend. Taxonomy has come under increasing scrutiny for species names that reference colonial figures, use slurs, or embed assumptions about the people and places where organisms were collected. Researchers have argued that scientific names exist within a broader cultural and historical context and that treating them as neutral labels, detached from social meaning, is itself a political stance.24PubMed Central. Stop using racist, unethical, and inappropriate names in taxonomy
The debate over renaming is contentious. Stability of nomenclature is a core principle in taxonomy, precisely because names serve as universal identifiers across languages and centuries. Changing a species name disrupts databases, checklists, and the traceability of research. But defenders of reform argue that the cost of retaining harmful names is borne disproportionately by the communities those names demean, and that a naming system meant to be universal should not casually exclude the people it affects. The dispute is fundamentally about what scientific language is for: whether its primary obligation is to historical continuity or to the scientific community as it exists today.