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Best practices for abbreviations

By Geoff Hart

Previously published as: Hart, G. 2018. Best practices for abbreviations. https://www.worldts.com/english-writing/eigo-ronbun60/index.html.

Scientists use many multi-word descriptions to represent key concepts in a manuscript. Because these phrases appear frequently in the manuscript, it’s natural to look for shortcuts that reduce the amount of typing and shorten the manuscript. Abbreviation (“making something shorter”) is a common solution. Unfortunately, any field of research develops many abbreviations, and this has two undesirable consequences. First, it encourages authors to create and use unnecessary abbreviations. Second, many of these abbreviations are obscure and difficult to remember. In this article, I’ll describe key characteristics of abbreviations that suggest “best practices” for how to use them.

The most important thing to remember is that unfamiliar abbreviations impose a significant burden on the reader’s memory and thus, make reading slower: each time we encounter an abbreviation, we must pause to remember what it means. The more abbreviations we ask readers to remember, the more difficult reading becomes: if the reader does not already know the meaning without having to stop and think about it, they must search through your paper to find where you defined it—or worse, consult a dictionary or do an Internet search. This also explains why abbreviations are acceptable for terms such as DNA or ANOVA: the abbreviation is so familiar that every reader knows its meaning, without having to stop reading to find the meaning.

Note: This is why you should avoid using existing abbreviations such as ANOVA to represent a different concept. Many readers will assume the more common meaning, and will have to re-examine the sentence when they discover that the expected meaning makes no sense.

Many journals list the standard abbreviations you can use without providing a definition, but it’s still wise to define all abbreviations the first time you use them. This is kind to students, who have not yet learned all of a science field’s terminology, and to readers who are still learning a difficult language such as English. Many journals ask authors to define all abbreviations in a list at the start of the manuscript to ensure that readers can quickly find these definitions. Because this list is so useful, particularly to the journal’s peer reviewers, you should consider providing a list of all abbreviations in your manuscript even if the journal guidelines do not require this. The journal’s copyeditors can always delete the list later if the journal doesn’t publish such lists.

The second-most-important thing to remember is the primary purpose of an abbreviation: to shorten something long. An abbreviation is useless if it does not save significant amounts of space. One common guideline is that you should never create an abbreviation for a single word, except when you have insufficient room for the full word. This is why writers often replace average with avg. in tables and figures, even though it only saves three characters. (You could instead write mean, which is no longer than avg. and doesn't require readers to remember the meaning of the abbreviation.) This is also why you will often see advice to use abbreviations only for phrases of three or more words. Three-word phrases are so common in science writing that they have their own abbreviation: "TLA", for three-letter abbreviation.

If you feel tempted to invent an abbreviation for the first time and use it in your manuscript, remember that it may be kinder to readers if you use the full words each time. If you still feel it’s necessary to create an abbreviation, the following guidelines will make it easier to remember:

• Use only the first letter of each word. Each letter then represents a single word in the longer phrase. Example: diameter at breast height = DBH.

• Don’t include letters to represent minor words (e.g., the “at” in the previous example) unless it makes the abbreviation easier to remember. (See the next point.)

• Use only the first syllable of each word to provide a stronger clue to each of the words. Example: analysis of variance = ANOVA (with “o” used to replace the minor word “of”).

Where possible, avoid abbreviations by replacing a long phrase with a simpler synonym. For example, if you write about a “System for Abbreviation Definition and Clarification”, you could define the abbreviation SADC to replace that long phrase. But it is clearer to simply write the system or it. For example:

We developed a system for abbreviation definition and clarification. This system explains how to create and define effective abbreviations. It offers a consistent approach to defining the name and meaning of abbreviations.

Once readers know what system you mean, it’s only necessary to repeat the full name when you are comparing it with another system and need to distinguish between the two. Even then, phrases such as the old system and the new system are often clearer.

Define abbreviations both in the Abstract and the first time the abbreviation appears in the main text. Ideally, readers should examine your methods and results and make their own decision about what you discovered before they compare their interpretation with yours (i.e., before they read the Abstract). In practice, many only read the Abstract, particularly if they encounter the Abstract separated from the rest of your paper (e.g., in Biological Abstracts); thus, define all abbreviations that appear in the Abstract. If you don’t provide a list of abbreviations at the start of your manuscript, and the manuscript is long (e.g., a literature review or a book), redefining abbreviations at the start of each section or in each chapter is redundant, but this redundancy is justified if it helps readers to remember or learn the meaning if they don’t start reading at the beginning (e.g., if they only consult one chapter of a book or one paper in a symposium proceedings).

Whether to capitalize an abbreviation varies between journals. Many capitalize each letter that represents a full word (e.g., JSPS = Japan Society for the Promotion of Science). Others may capitalize only the first letter in an abbreviation or none of the letters (e.g., Lidar vs. lidar vs. LiDAR). The second option is most common for abbreviations that have been used so long that they are treated like ordinary words (e.g., laser, radar).

The abbreviations used for variable names require special formatting. For normal variables that take only a single value at any point in time, the name is usually capitalized and italicized. For example, P without italics represents the element phosphorus, whereas P in italics represents the probability level in tests of statistical significance. Complications arise if you use an abbreviation both in a general sense and as a variable name. For example, you might use DNA to represent both the phrase deoxyribonucleic acid and the concentration of a given DNA. If you italicize the word only when it represents the variable, the nonitalicized form looks like an error. Conversely, you might italicize both uses of the abbreviation, but then non-italicized abbreviations such as ANOVA look like errors. In such cases, the best solution is to choose a different name for the variable. For example, use C (in italics) to represent all concentration variables, but add a few letters as a subscript (text formatted to appear slightly below the line that holds the C) to clarify which specific concentration you mean: C_DNA and C_RNA would represent the concentrations of DNA and RNA, respectively.

Following these guidelines will solve most problems related to abbreviations, while also making your manuscripts clearer and easier to read.

©2004–2024 Geoffrey Hart. All rights reserved.