Unfortunately there's a bit of pressure to osbficate the core idea of a publication in academia. While the ideal academics try to hold themselves to is to freely exchange information, for researchers who are paid to study very neiche topics there's an insensitive to put some resistance into others entering their field. There is only so much funding and one more team means more competition. So some researchers who find themselves in that position will intentionally complicate their published work as a way to create a disincentive to others from crowding their field. It sucks but the reality is that funding and money come before the faithful pursuit of knowledge.

Also, some people just suck at writing.

Ah, yes. Of course. I understand your frustration entirely because of my deep understanding of the specific situation.

Cell signalling pathways was the worst part of microbial genetics for me. Luckily I don't have to deal with that anymore as my day to day is digital PCR and NGS.

Would a list of tools and search engines be helpful?

If you want to get published you've got to sound the part. No fancy words => no publishing => no grant money => less sciencing and more flipping burgers

I always thought it had to do with avoiding ambiguity. By using a specific word with a specific meaning, you don't need to expand on the context. I think I read that somewhere a long time ago and just accepted it.

To reach the necessary amount of pages so I can graduate.

100%. This is actually the entire reason I dropped out of my masters program.

I’m a science communicator. My whole purpose for existing is making science accessible to people with less formal science training than a high school student.

I was going for a masters in conservation biology, because what better to communicate these days, right? And in the limnology class I took the first semester, all my papers got poor marks for failing to use the unnecessary academic terminology. It was all entirely correct information, just simplified, and that was unacceptable.

And I can’t work under those terms. I just am entirely incapable of making things overly complicated for no reason. It’s a force for specificity sometimes, but usually what it actually does is limit the reach of the work. And that’s just stupid.

I despise this, too. I work in a pretty technical field and actively throw bricks at people who write like this.

That same problem can be seen in law and it's a lot more relevant to the average citizen than academic papers, since "know your rights" means jack shit if you have no fucking clue what the words mean.

It's snobbish gatekeeping to feel superior to the filthy plebs

What kills me a little is when someone has to come up with some nebulous acronym that we're all supposed to know but no one ever defines it at the beginning of the document. In EEG we like to change the name of what are now known as lateralized periodic discharges. I have a document with about 25 different terms that all describe different terminology that's been used to describe that EEG finding.

Me as an intern in a lab, being asked among others to review a draft

Hey, can you explain to me equation 3.1? I am not sure what N and Q refers to?

Oh that one I just copied from another paper, it is not really important to the argument.

I yell at any co worker about exactly this. We even deal with the public and they use terms and jargon no one will understand it leads to mistakes.

It's just weird gatekeeping.

Oddly enough multiple classes I took at uni even covered communicating with simple terms, being understandable, and not using jargon. Yet here we are still...

I'm academia? How about Wikipedia, an encyclopedia that should be written (at least at synopsis level) clearly and for the casual reader. However, anything mathematics related and... Fuck you, you don't know how to calculate an integral? Git gud, scrub.

There's a popular figure in a fringe topic who's contributed to computer science enough to have earned respect (and rightfully so) who writes these fringe articles with so much fanfare and pretentiousness that the entire meaning is impossible to extract.

It just ends up sounding like a pretentious word salad.