Why do researchers sometimes use extremely complicated English sentences to convey their meaning? I will begin with a disclaimer, I am not an English native speaker, but I can speak fluent English and understand English in almost all research papers I read. 

However, occasionally I come across some papers published in peer reviewed journals  with ridiculously complicated sentence structure using relic non-technical vocabulary that no one in the past century has heard of! 

Here is one of my favorites:


  The algorithm fathoms in a synergetic manner globally, and an antagonistic depth quest locally.


Whatever that means!

Don't get me wrong, the content of such papers can sometimes be informative, but I can't help but get frustrated over such over complication in language! I can spend days trying to decipher what the author was trying to convey and I occasionally give up on the entire paper.

So my question is, why do authors feel the need to hide their amazing ideas/contributions behind such language barrier? Would it hurt to write the paper in a simple fashion such that any reader with the required technical background can understand it? 


  auth'rs, wherefore thee doth this?
I've run into variations of this a lot in economics, and have a few observations.


Being good at research in your field is an entirely separate skill from being able to communicate ideas clearly.  Two Nobel laureates really embody the extremes here for me, both with brilliant research.  One the one side is Paul Krugman, who, regardless of what you think of his public persona, is an excellent writer.  His skill comes across even in his research papers, and even in his work from the '70s.  On the other hand is Amartya Sen, who it often seems to me can't express an idea clearly in one sentence if it could equally well be conveyed in fifteen.  Granted, Sen wasn't born in an English speaking country, but he left for school in England in 1953, so he's hardly new at this.
There appears to be some institutional momentum.  That is, you learn to be a researcher in your field by reading the work of past researchers.  That frames your concept of what quality writing in your field looks like, which you then adopt to some degree.
It can be a signaling method. This is related to the previous point.  For professionals used to reading papers written with heavy use of jargon or unnecessarily-big words, writing this way can make your work seem like it belongs.  I often feel like the use of latin phrases really falls into this category.  I myself enjoy the occasional ceteris paribus, for example, but it really isn't a very defensible practice over writing all else equal.  It isn't even shorter!


I think many of us could benefit from thinking about writing more clearly, but it also makes sense to know your audience and write for them.