An example of an analogy in science discourse:
"The branding of a research field can be a double-edged sword, Zhukhovitskiy [Dr Alex Zhukhovitskiy, a synthetic polymer chemist from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the US] acknowledges. 'It can be very distracting if everybody comes up with different ways of naming the same thing.' But the right term can change the perspective from which you think about a problem, he says. 'I think the editing terminology invokes selectivity and precision, in analogy with editing text where you can insert letters, delete them or change their order.' Reframing a research area in this way can also serve as a focal point, concentrating renewed research effort, he adds…
The examples of polymer backbone modification…discovered in the literature included cyclisations, decyclisations, deletions, insertions – and combinations of the above."
James Mitchell Crow (2024) Editing polymer backbones, Chemistry World, February 2024. pp.48-51
Read examples of scientific analogies
The reference to a double-edge sword is metaphorical, but this metaphor is so widely used it may be considered to be idiomatic.
Read about communicating science through idioms
