We read with great interest the study by Barnett and Doubleday on demonstrating the ascendancy of COVID-19 research using acronyms (Barnett & Doubleday, 2021). However, two major concerns were raised, such as how to (1) measure the strength of quantity referred to the next counterparts and (2) produce the traditional line charts on a dashboard that provides more valuable information to readers.

The absolute advantage coefficient(AAC) (Chang et al., 2020; Chien, 2012; Lee et al., 2020, 2021; Wang et al., 2021; Yang et al., 2021) to report the strength of quantity when compared to the next two counterparts using Eq. (1) and (2):

$${\text{Ratio}} = \frac{{\frac{{{\upgamma }_{1} }}{{{\upgamma }_{2} }}}}{{\frac{{{\upgamma }_{2} }}{{{\upgamma }_{3} }}}},$$
(1)
$${\text{AAC}} = \frac{{{\text{Ratio}}}}{{\left( {1 + {\text{Ratio}}} \right)}},$$
(2)

where Ratio is determined by the three consecutive numbers of acronyms(e.g., in 20,220; the top three have the most number of frequency in quantity, denoted by γ1, γ2, and γ3 in Eq. (1)). The ACC ranged from 0 to 1.0 stands for the strength of quantity in 2020 when compared to the next two acronyms.

We extracted the top eight acronyms involved in the article title shown in Table 1(Barnett & Doubleday, 2021) and downloaded them from PubMed since 1950. In comparison to the original counts shown in the study (Barnett & Doubleday, 2021), almost equal counts across the eight acronyms were found in Table 1. The AACs were particularly calculated for the two studies. We can see that the AACs in 2020(> 0.80) are substantially greater than those in 2019(\(\cong 0.50)\). The higher ACC for the top one acronym means stronger in quantity when compared to the next two.

Table 1 Comparison of numbers of acronyms and AACs in two studies
Full size table

Next, the line charts are shown in Fig. 1. More valuable information is provided to readers, including (i) DNA and RNA are popular over three decades; (ii) CT, MRI, HIV, SARS, and CoV start in 1972, 1985, 1986, 2003, and 2003, respectively; (iii) the number of COVID substantially surpasses over other seven acronyms in 2020 though the seven acronyms are almost equal in quantity in 2020.

Fig. 1
figure 1

The most popular scientific acronyms in health and medical journals over the years

Full size image

We provided a video MP4 with a link at the reference (Chien, 2021a). Readers are invited to scan the QR-code or click on the link (Chien, 2021b) to manipulate the line charts by using the zoom-in and zoom-out functions on a dashboard laid on Google Maps that is unique and modern, and easier to understand the features of frequencies in acronyms than the static line charts shown in the studied (Barnett & Doubleday, 2020, 2021).

We produced the improved Table 1 and Fig. 1 when compared to the previous study (Barnett & Doubleday, 2021). The abstract video is present in (Chien, 2021a) for readers who are interested in replicating Table 1 and Fig. 1 on their own in the future.