Even Scientists Are Confused by Jargon

One of the things the pandemic has made very clear is that scientists need to work on their communication skills. There's a place for precise terminology, but when you are trying to communicate with the lay public, or other scientists who might be working in a different field, clear, jargon-free, and precise communication is vital if you want your message to be heard and understood. 

This isn't just a platitude. Per the New York Times, clarity of communication affects how other scientists cite papers in their research. And for scientists, getting their papers cited by other scientists is a major career booster. 

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.

So if you don't want to perish when you publish, be clear.