Can I assume that a biologist will know what "lhs" and "rhs" mean? Or what are some other ways of indicating the left/right hand sides of an equation? [closed]

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I am writing a scientific article with a few mathematical equations. Can I assume that my audience will know what lhs and rhs mean?

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4 Answers

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If you even have to think if your audience knows what a particular abbreviation means, then you must explain it.

In any case, writing LHS/RHS in anything but very informal contexts seems simply unacceptable to me.

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I like to define acronyms like:

"The left hand side (LHS) of Equation 1..."

And then use LHS throughout the rest of the paper if it is used frequently. If you only use "left hand side" a few times, it's best to just spell it out.

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I think abbreviations like that rarely pay.

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I think it should be pretty obvious. Or you can simply say that LHS means "left hand side" and RHS means "right hand side." But many biologists have probably studied some probability or statistics. So they might have seen this notation before.

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