What's a CAT?
Why use abbrevations, acronyms?
The last years the medical literature, especially in U.S. journals,
is infected with a special kind of jargon: abbrevations & acronyms.
This epidemic is contraproductive to international professional
communication. Often it is jargon that is limited to one country, one
culture, within the scientific community. And that is definitely not
the function of professional jargon. Professional jargon is meant to
form a bridge between cultures as the carrier of all professional
jargons, the english language, hase evolved to the basis of all
international communication.
Of course, I am not opposed to abbrevations for often used, long
technical terms as HIV, RNA and SPSS which are actually
internationally standardised short-names. And I like the creativity
of authors as shown by suprising titles of research projects (MrFIT).
But country dependent jargon, especially that from native english
speaking members of the scientific community, makes texts
inaccessable to outsiders, in particular to non-native speaking
colleagues.
This epidemic of country dependent jargon has been followed by a
sub-epidemic of article dependent abbrevation-jargon. Some authors
invent their own abbrevations for one particular article only, with
no apparent reason whatsoever other than to show off their grandeur.
This type concerns an extremely virulent communication virus that can
easily kill the always vulnerable author-reader realionship.
Please help us, outsiders with our limited mental hard disks, to feel
at home.
Nico van Duijn
Dr.N.P. van Duijn, General Practitioner
Department of General Practice
Division Public Health
Academic Medical Centre
University of Amsterdam
Meibergdreef 15
1105 AZ Amsterdam
& Primary Health Care Centre 'de Haak'
Almere
the Netherlands
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