This article is more than 2 years old.

October 20, 2014 This article is more than 2 years old.

Academic papers are often long, tedious and impossible to read, as Steven Pinker pointed out last month. So researchers are trying to make themselves more accessible with going as far away from the norm as possible, posting 140-character descriptions of their work using emoji as descriptors, with the hashtag #emojiresearch.

We’ve compiled some of the latest ones (and the Chronicle of Higher Education has more).

Some of them are easy to interpret.

Tiffany Montgomery studies sexual health disparities among vulnerable populations, and aims to prevent sexually transmitted infections and unintended pregnancies.

Francisco Lobos researches how plants capture light and transfer energy.

Nina Daoud reads and writes about people from the US and around the world pursuing education in America. Daoud didn’t have the easiest time explaining her research in emoji, though.

Some academics can be as hard to understand in emoji as they are in academic papers. But at least the tweets are more fun to look at.

We welcome your interpretations of the tweets.