Polje, nappe, vuggy, psammite. Some cave-dwelling scientists may not strike an eye, but for the rest of us, those terms might as well be Greek.
Specialized terminology is not unique to the ivory tower – for example, ask a baker about torture or a tree grower about bracts. But it’s widespread in academia, and now a team of researchers has analyzed jargon in a set of more than 21,000 scientific manuscripts. They found that other researchers cited papers with higher proportions of jargon in their titles and summaries less frequently. The science communication – with the public, but also among scientists – suffers as a result of a research article with too much specialized terminology.
These results were published Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Jargon can be a problem, but it also serves a purpose, said Hillary Shulman, a communications scientist at Ohio State University. “As our ideas are refined, it makes sense that our concepts do the same.” This language-within-a-language can be a time-saver, a way to convey meaning precisely, she said. However, it also runs the risk of strongly reminding people – even some well-trained researchers – that they do not ‘know’.
“It’s alienating,” says Dr. Shulman.
Two scientists recently investigated how the use of jargon affects the possibility of a manuscript being cited in other scientific journal articles. Such citations are a recognition of the importance and relevance of a study, and are used to estimate the productivity of a researcher.
Alejandro Martínez, an evolutionary biologist, and Stefano Mammola, an ecologist, both at the National Research Council in Pallanza, Italy, started collecting scientific articles. Using the Web of Science, an online platform that allows subscribers to access databases of scientific publications, they have reset 21,486 manuscripts focused on cave research.
Cave science is a particularly jargon-heavy field, said dr. Martinez said. This is because it attracts a diverse group of researchers, each bringing their own terminology. Anthropologists, geologists, zoologists and ecologists all come together in caves, he said. “They like the rocks or the bugs, the human remains or murals.”
To compile a list of cave-related jargon words, dr. Martínez combed the glossaries of cave books and review studies. He decided on about 1,500 conditions (including the four that appear at the beginning of this article).
Dr. Mammola then wrote a computer program to calculate the amount of jargon words in the title and summary of each manuscript. The researchers found that papers with a higher fraction of jargon received fewer citations. And none of the most cited articles – with more than 450 citations – used language in their title, while almost all had summaries where less than 1 percent of the words were jargon.
Since citations are often considered a measure of academic success, jargon has a negative effect on a paper, states dr. Martínez and dr. Mammola for. Fewer quotes could mean that a paper is not read and remembered, which is bad news for scientific communication in general, the team concluded.
However, other researchers have found that using less common words – a form of jargon – can be beneficial. David Markowitz, a psychologist of language research at the University of Oregon, analyzed the summaries of nearly 20,000 proposals for funding from the National Science Foundation. His results, published in 2019, revealed that abstracts containing less common words tended to obtain more subsidies. “Jargon is not always associated with negative outcomes,” said Dr. Markowitz said.
But clear communication should always be a goal in science, said Sabine Stanley, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University. “It’s important to step back and always remind yourself as a scientist: how do I describe what I do to someone who does not do it 24/7 like I do?”
Dr. Stanley recently participated in the Up-Goer Five Challenge at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Inspired by an xkcd cartoon explaining the Saturn V rocket in plain language by Randall Munroe (sometimes a contributor to Times), the contestants challenge the contestants to convey their science with only the thousand most common words in the English language (a text editor is available).
“It’s quite challenging,” said Dr. Stanley said, presenting new results from the Mars InSight lander.
The title of her talk? ” A space computer that was named to the red world last year and here’s what we’ve found so far. ‘