Is it just me, or have scientific abstracts turned into exercises in deciphering pure gibberish?

Given the high reputation and declared quality of the Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation (JNER), one expects rigorous clarity. Instead, reading the abstract of a recent paper by Charbonnier et al. ("Variable kinetic constraints in robotic assistance enhance learning of a complex motor skill") is a masterclass in obfuscation.
It is literally impossible to figure out the most elementary details of what actually happened in the lab.

What did the human subjects physically do? What did the robot add? What joint was moving? The text simply hides the setup behind layers of dense jargon:

They claim subjects learned a "complex torque-motion profile," but fail to state if this was elbow flexion, shoulder abduction, or multi-joint reaching. They confuse software tolerance rules with physical force constraints, label a force-corridor tweak as a physical load without defining if 2 N·m is huge or negligible for the unnamed joint, and abruptly claim "kinematic tracking" gains in the results despite kinematics vanishing from the methods entirely. The text then buries these gaps under a barrage of textbook buzzwords about task space exploration, predictive mapping, and internal models.

My educated guess is that healthy participants strapped an arm into a robot to match a screen target within a software-enforced force corridor. But because the authors refused to describe their setup clearly, any reader is forced to rely on pure guesswork.

Most egregiously, this has nothing to do with rehabilitation. Testing healthy subjects on an abstract two-day torque-matching task without measuring neural recovery, spasticity, or functional independence is not neurorehabilitation. Slapping "robotic rehabilitation protocols" into the final sentence does not make a force-tracking game clinically relevant to patients with real motor deficits.

An abstract in a journal of JNER's standing should explain what was done, what was found, and why it matters in 30 seconds. Instead, simple setups are allowed to hide behind impenetrable jargon and unproven clinical claims.

Have you noticed a similar trend of obfuscation over clarity in major journals?

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12984-026-02101-8

#Neurorehabilitation #Neurotechnology #Neuroengineering #Robotics #ScientificPublishing #AcademicWriting #ResearchQuality #JNER