Sun 17 Feb 2008

Be Careful With Acronyms In Headlines

Earlier this week, an article about writing newspaper headlines to be friendly to search engines floated down my del.icio.us network's feed (that link brought to you via Matt Croydon). It's interesting because it's true, obvious in hindsight and not generally done.

Today, I saw the corollary to that: Don't use ambiguous acronyms in headlines.

I work in the IT industry. Everybody who's ever had to evaluate a solution in IT knows about the acronym NIH — not invented here. Thus, the following headline from the Open Access blog seemed odd:

Universities' obligations under the NIH policy

After a mental double-take, I realised there was another definition of NIH, mostly used in that sliver of land that exists to keep Mexico and Canada apart. The National Institutes of Health. The acronym is never defined (it is in the article linked from that post, but how hard do you want me to work here?), so I choose to prefer my interpretation. It's then a truly noteworthy article:

These are contractual commitments made by the university to [Not Invented Here]. ... universities have to get a process in place quickly for ensuring that the PI's [...] don't take any action that puts the university in a position in which the university cannot comply with this term.

...perhaps they should ask Congress to declare that federally funded research articles get no copyright at all - which is true for articles written by ["Not Invented Here"] employees.

I've worked with people I'd consider Not Invented Here employees. It was really hard to get them to consider anything made by other people. Maybe they were just bitter about not having copyright protection in the US?!

Topics: funny