General ⇒ acronyms for everyone

[pizzocaro]

I want to discuss about acronyms usage, especially in a scientific text.

Good guidelines can be:

• 1. use only a handful of the best known and widely used acronyms;
  2. define all abbreviation the first time you use them;
  3. do not use them as the subject of a sentence.

In LaTeX the packages acronym or glossaries can help, in particular about the second point.

However I started to note that there is a (somewhat) hierarchy of acronyms:

• acronyms that are no longer such, but were elevated to the rank of ordinary words (for example, laser or Fiat, the car manufacturer);
• very common acronyms of general use (for example CD or DVD);
• very common acronyms specific of a technical field (for example HTML or RAM in computer science, magneto-optical trap (MOT) in physics and many others); the guidelines and packages above are geared towards this type;
• not common acronyms, for example newly defined, that, IMHO, should be avoided at al costs.

What bothers me is that there are certain acronyms that while very common in written papers, they are rarely spoken out (while others are used also verbally). In physics for example: free spectral range (FSR), Fabry-Perot (FP), full width at half maximum (FWHM), etc.

On one hand I am tempted to not use this kind of acronyms at all, to improve readability by a wide audience. On the other hand they are common, surely found in works I am going to cite, and defining them could be useful. Moreover they could appear where space is a concern, for example in pictures, plots or in mathematical symbols, for example:

Code: Select all

$\Delta\nu_\mathrm{FSR}$

Therefore I am tempted to define this acronym the first time, but subsequently use only the long form, using the short form only in pictures or maths. For this I will need a custom command (I think I can adapt one from the acronym package; I will ask help for this).

Possible objections to this approach are: it is not very consistent; pictures will have other abbreviations that are going to be defined in the caption; math symbols need to be defined on their own.

So, what do you think? What do you suggest?
Do you known any authoritative reference on the matter?