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1. A thread on jargon and whether it impacts the citation rates of papers that use it, based on a paper by @UllAmartinez and @stefanomammola1
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2020.2581
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2020.2581
2. My first painful brush with jargon was probably in 9th grade biology.
Endoplasmic reticulum. Cytosol. Ribonucleic acid. Oxidative phosphorylation. Phospholipid bilayer.
And that was just the words I *didn't* know.
Endoplasmic reticulum. Cytosol. Ribonucleic acid. Oxidative phosphorylation. Phospholipid bilayer.
And that was just the words I *didn't* know.
3. If anything, the words I *did* know were even worse. "Nuclear" had nothing to do with the ever-present terror of a radioactive Day After. "Bases" were unrelated to America's Pastime. "Translation" didn't refer to what happened in those headphones that delegates wore at the UN.
4. It all infuriated me at the time, but in retrospect you need some term for where proteins are synthesized within a cell that is more concise and more precise than that wavy part with the bumps on it.
5. Still, jargon is no fun when you're trying to learn a field, and it may even create substantive barriers between fields that impede interdisciplinary collaboration. A few years ago I even wrote a paper about this with
@jevinwest, @mrosvall, and others.
https://sociologicalscience.com/articles-vol1-15-221/
@jevinwest, @mrosvall, and others.
https://sociologicalscience.com/articles-vol1-15-221/
6. The idea in that paper was to try to build topographic maps of fields, where distance in the x-y plane represented degree of citation flow, and ridges or mountain ranges represented places where jargon varied between fields that otherwise interacted closely.
7. In graduate school I noticed that when I skimmed tables of contents (remember doing that?), I was drawn to papers with short, direct, jargon-free titles.
The new paper by @UllAmartinez and @stefanomammola1 tests to see if I was anomaly in that regard.
Spoiler: I wasn't.
The new paper by @UllAmartinez and @stefanomammola1 tests to see if I was anomaly in that regard.
Spoiler: I wasn't.
8. Looking at over 21,000 papers in cave science, they find a significant negative relationship between citation rate and the use of jargon in the title and abstract of papers.
Below, citation residuals versus jargon for paper titles.
Below, citation residuals versus jargon for paper titles.
