Are You Confused by Scientific Jargon? So Are Scientists (nytimes.com) 53
Scientific papers containing lots of specialized terminology are less likely to be cited by other researchers. The New York Times reports: Polje, nappe, vuggy, psammite. Some scientists who study caves might not bat an eye, but for the rest of us, these terms might as well be ancient Greek. Specialized terminology isn't unique to the ivory tower -- just ask a baker about torting or an arborist about bracts, for example. But it's pervasive in academia, and now a team of researchers has analyzed jargon in a set of over 21,000 scientific manuscripts. They found that papers containing higher proportions of jargon in their titles and abstracts were cited less frequently by other researchers. Science communication -- with the public but also among scientists -- suffers when a research paper is packed with too much specialized terminology, the team concluded. 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 become more refined, it makes sense that our concepts do too." This language-within-a-language can be a timesaver, a way to precisely convey meaning, she said. However, it also runs the risk of starkly reminding people -- even some well-educated researchers -- that they aren't "in the know." "It's alienating," said Dr. Shulman.
Jargon can be a problem, but it also serves a purpose, said Hillary Shulman, a communications scientist at Ohio State University. "As our ideas become more refined, it makes sense that our concepts do too." This language-within-a-language can be a timesaver, a way to precisely convey meaning, she said. However, it also runs the risk of starkly reminding people -- even some well-educated researchers -- that they aren't "in the know." "It's alienating," said Dr. Shulman.
Simple solution (Score:5, Insightful)
If the words/phrases you want to use aren't in a dictionary, put in a damn glossary!
Then you won't have to complain that people didn't really understand your phrasing and so assumed you were an idiot....
Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Interesting)
Correlation is not causation, so it isn't clear if TFA is even correctly identifying the "problem".
Rather than the jargon causing the low number of citations, it is more likely that the lack of citations is because they are crappy papers written by mediocre researchers. The heavy use of jargon is just a symptom of that.
Smart researchers tend to write clearly. Papers with high impact are written so that everyone understands their importance, while more trivial results use jargon to obfuscate their irrelevance.
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Papers with high impact are written so that everyone understands their importance, while more trivial results use jargon to obfuscate their irrelevance.
A thousand times so!
Note: also applies to business communications.
Re:Simple solution (Score:4, Insightful)
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Good point. Overuse of jargon is a way to inflate importance, to compensate for insecurity. Often it fails.
I would add that it is more than that, it is done at any level. Randall Munroe describes how challenging it was to write 'Thing Explainer'. Part of the challenge was fighting the need to use the most precise word available because you just don't want to people to think you don't know the best word.
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Or, more likely, papers with more specialized language are on more specialized topics.
Number of citations is a shitty metric for any number of reasons.
The horizon of complexity keeps narrowing (Score:5, Insightful)
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Jargon's good for only two things (Score:4, Interesting)
In my experience, people use jargon for one of two reasons:
The first is used by some people to give the impression that they are smarter than other people. It's a power thing and they seem to feel superior to others when they have to explain, in "laymen's terms", what they are saying.
The second is to bullshit management into doing what the speaker wants. I suspect everyone here on /. has used this at least once in their careers simply because it's easier to get agreement on work with a marginal business case than to spell it out in terms a non-coder/engineer can understand.
Re:Jargon's good for only THREE things (Score:5, Interesting)
You are missing a third case that is common in Computer Science, Biology, etc.
The percentage of people that are trying to be a precise as possible. They don't use meaningless bullshit jargons for the sake of trying to be important but who are genuinely trying to convey a concise, succinct summary.
I work in Computer Graphics so if I write/say SSAO or SVO people know exactly that it means Screen Space Ambient Occlusion [wikipedia.org] or Sparse Voxel Octree [wikipedia.org] and I don't have to "bloat" communicating with verbose words.
Why do doctors use all these "fancy" terms for bones and muscles? Because they are trying to be precise without having to ramble on and on trying to convey a precise location with imprecise words.
But I hear what you are getting at. Far too often some PHP starts spewing jargon because of some stupid latest buzzword fad. It just makes them look dumb and insecure.
With that said, yeah, we probably really a little TOO much on acronyms. I know in computers graphics it is almost like reading a sea of bloody acronyms at times with all the 3-letter and 4-letter acronyms. A good reminder that sometimes we probably should focus a tad more on the layperson then being "technical" ALL the time.
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s/PHP/PHB or CEO
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I am going to defer to Gunther von Hagens that the main reason for jargon in medicine is more to maintain their status of priesthood (which is especially annoying when a large portion of their profession is explaining risk/procedures/etc. to patients). Precision comes from understanding, not the means of conveyance.
Certainly some specific situations of creating new words or research papers written for a very specific crowd, but for the most part jargon is more an exercise in obfuscation rather than clarity.
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Jargon is what you use when you can't use math.
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Well, some people in professional fields use it naturally because lots of other people in their field are also using it and it allows for efficient communication. But I get what you are saying.
THIRD REASON (Score:5, Insightful)
The actual reason Jargon is supposed to be used is:
To be super clear when talking to other experts
If you are a doctor, you can't say "he broke his leg bone" when talking to other doctors.
Instead you have to say Femur, Tibia, Fibula, etc.
The problem is you should never use those words when talking to a patient or their family. They do not need that kind of accuracy.
Similar things happens in ALL fields of science.
When you use technical terms to non-technical people, it becomes jargon. The only real reasons are those you mentioned.
But the jargon itself has a real purpose when talking to other experts and ONLY when talking to other experts.
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I work in the medical field. I avoid jargon whenever possible. I've gotten a few weird looks from other professionals when I use plain language instead of jargon, but when I ask if I was at all unclear they always have to admit that I was clear, and often comment that it was refreshing. But even more importantly, those that use jargon a lot can often get caught using it wrong. People love to use lots of precision by using jargon, but it's often more precision than actually exists. For your broken bone analo
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That's likely for the best too. Medical professionals are in general over worked with too many patients to care for and a dozen people with various degrees of experience and education easily interact with a single patient each day. Patient's aren't always the best advocates for their care, but they are still in a position to catch some classes of dangerous errors but they can only do that if they have some familiarity with the jargon used. Words like 'hyper' and 'hypo' are terrible for this.
Really minor cas
Same shit in Tech! (Score:2)
Same shit in Tech! Fucking buzzwords EVERYWHERE for the purpose of out-marketing the competitor via fake advantages, renaming shit that's existed for decades to artificially sound impressive.
Slashdot editors are confused by English (Score:1)
Editors: EDIT
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Worst papers are from PhD students (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to be in science and write papers (as a PhD student).
You could tell the papers written by my peers, as opposed to senior professors, by the fact that they were very confuse. Not only language - that too, lots of jargon - but also difficult to understand conceptually, very difficult to learn from, probably correct, but terribly tiresome to read. Opposed to that I remember having read cornerstone papers of the old masters, e.g.
the EPR paper on quantum teleportation. Even as an undergraduate it was very easy to understand.
Having written few papers of my own, but not enough to feel comfortable (although some did end up getting published in high-ranking journals), I can still remember why: I was terrified that somehow, somebody, would realize how little of a clue I had. I somehow had that notion that if I'd pack as many of the new words I barely knew the meaning of inside, that'd be less of a telltale of what a dilletant I was.
At a certain point I came to realize that it wasn't fancy words, but clarity, that makes up good science. And that regardless of how little I thought knew, everybody else knew even less, because that's the nature of writing PhD thesis - you're the first to do that (highly specific) thing, so by definition you're the world expert in that particular niche, regardless how narrow :-)
Eventually I got better at knowing stuff (also outside of science), and started more and more to look for clarity in what I do and know to do it, rather than for volume.
Still have a long way to go though.
Multiple Causes for the Correlation Found (Score:5, Insightful)
The correlation supports at least two hypotheses:
1. People are turned away by papers that are more jargon-filled and are less likely to cite them.
2. The kind of people who unnecessarily fill their papers with jargon are the same kind of people who aren't doing very good research, so readability aside, these papers aren't worth citing.
They don't acknowledge this in their actual paper.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2020.2581 [royalsocie...ishing.org]
They conclude that their analysis "clearly emphasizes the negative effect of jargon on the success of a paper." But I suspect a correlation between jargon and paper quality, so the lack of citations may be dependent on the "quality" variable, with "jargon" just hitching a correlative ride on quality.
Of course, this would be very difficult to decorrelate because you'd need some measure of the quality of the science in the paper... and the only measure typically used for that on a large scale is citations...
But their findings do not necessarily imply that if the same poorly cited papers had less jargon that they would have performed equally to the other papers.
Re:Multiple Causes for the Correlation Found (Score:5)
Not the real ones. (Score:2)
Another conclusion from the results (Score:3)
"They found that papers containing higher proportions of jargon in their titles and abstracts were cited less frequently by other researchers"
Rather than being due to technical terms, this could surely be explained by more technical papers being cited less often then more general papers ?
Just no solution to this. (Score:2)
Dang. If only there was some book or free service available to everyone at all times to define words for people. But I guess this is just life now.
Aerospace has problems with overuse of acronyms (Score:4, Funny)
Apparently the new employee introduction slide deck at SpaceX has a slide along the lines of, "At SpaceX, we have a no-acronym policy, or NAP."
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NAP
Wouldn't that be a NAP policy?
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Yeah, the use of acronyms to mean different things in different fields is really annoying.
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One defence contractor I worked for had a 50-page dictionary for all of their acronyms.
I'm _SHOCKED_! (Score:2)
I would sincerely hope that a cardiopulmonologist would be able to _fully_ understand the latest, and deepest, learnings of an oncologist! It's heresy that one not be completely substitutable for the other.
Why, a particle physicist being unable to understand the detailed, domain-specific vernacular and names for individual sub-species in zoology?! A zoologist being unfamiliar with subatomic particles and their field interactions?? Absolutely unacceptable!
(This article is click-bait, right? I mean, they said
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People really love simple, concise, intuitive explanations. Unfortunately they also hate it when you give them one, explain that it's limited and really only good for a basic understanding, and shouldn't be relied upon in other contexts.
Example:
General relativity describes gravity as being like a rubber sheet, curving around massive objects sitting on top of it.
Oh, so {semi-logical deduction}?
Well, no, because {explanation of four dimensional geometry, spacetime, metrics, coordinate singularities, etc.}
Damm
Jargon has its uses good and bad (Score:1)
Horribly Flawed (Score:2)
Apparently the only confounding variable controlled for was the time of publication of the article. This would be fine if the authors wished to state a fairly weak claim (and usually it's the pop writeup that's guilty of exaggerating it) but they say
While our analysis does not inform about the epistemological basis driving the choice for one word or another, it clearly emphasizes the negative effect of jargon on the success of a paper.
which isn't warranted from their limited analysis.
A fairly obvious reason that you might find less jargon in the highly cited papers is because those are the papers introducing new ideas into the field. They're obviously not going to use new terms in the titles
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There will always be multiple reasons that one research paper is cited by another - among them the fact that there are two or more researchers or teams of researchers engaged on exploring the same or closely related fields.
If everything were equal [i.e. if we eliminated the consideration of jargon for the purpose of considering this point] then we might expect to see clusters of citations around topics that were being actively researched by academics and industry groups.
This is not to
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You're right, except on this point. "Success" of a paper is now defined as how many times it gets cited. By extension, "success" of a researcher is now defined as how many people cite their papers.
Clearly following from your points, this is a terrible, terrible idea.
rahisibhasha! (Score:1)
The Two Cultures (Score:1)
TMA? (Score:2)
Hardly news... (Score:1)
Back in the day my sis asked me to take a read of her doctoral dissertation.
I read the opening page, she asked me what I thought. I told her that I had no clue what she was talking about. Her reaction was to respond... Most excellent!
Meaning, if her multilingual brother who was an engineer had zero clue, then she heading in the right direction. I guess it is why she is a a professor these days.
Treknobabble (Score:3)
Strangely, Treknobabble seems to make sense to the viewer during an episode, especially a Voyager episode.
Recoupling the trans-inverters with self-sealing stembolts will seal the breach long enough for the nanopolymers to recrystallize the dilithium matrix. It'll be enough to give us Warp 2. Make it so!
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I thought the running gag from DS9 is that no one ever knows what stembolts are for, let alone what the self sealing sort do.
At least have the decency to tell us the meaning (Score:2)
psammite: a general term for sandstone. It is equivalent to the Latin-derived term arenite and is commonly used in various publications to describe a metamorphosed sedimentary rock with a dominantly sandstone protolith. In Europe, this term was formerly used for a fine-grained, fissile, clayey sandstone.
vuggy: A small cavity in a rock or vein, often with a mineral lining of different composition from that of the surrounding rock.
nappe: a large sheetlike body of rock that has been moved more than 2 km or 5 k
Confusion or specilization (Score:2)
Social sciences... (Score:3)
It's not the jargon per se (Score:2)
People who don't actually have much to say try to make their research (or press releases in the case of e.g. police) sound "smarter" by using tons of obfuscating jargon and fancy words. Another place this happens with a vengeance is in education research and philosophy.
But, real scientists see that it is just garbage, and so don't cite it because there is no there there. It's not the jargon, it's the gaping vacuum the jargon is trying to cover up.