Scientific jargon and the flow of ideas

The study of scientific communication typically focuses on citations. Yet scientific language has a substantial impact on how information flows through citation networks. For example, specialist language or “jargon" allows experts to communicate efficiently. Using jargon with outsiders, however, makes communication highly inefficient. To explore this duality, we developed a simple information-theoretic model of scientific communication, quantifying the presence and impact of jargon. We apply this measure to scientific papers from JSTOR. We find systematic differences between major domains of scholarship; the biological sciences have higher jargon barriers on average than the social sciences. We also demonstrate that citation distance does not always reflect jargon distance. We visualize the combination of citation and jargon information in a novel topographic map of science, in which distance reflects citation rates between fields and topographic height represents the jargon barriers between them. We find that the ability of two fields to communicate efficiently decays exponentially with the citation distance between them. We argue that this field-specific decay rate reflects the relative insularity of the field. Taken together, these rates reveal hidden processes of cohesion or fragmentation. For example, the ecological sciences are balkanized by jargon, reflecting distinct interests, while the biomolecular sciences are integrated with each other, despite high overall jargon. Our results highlight the promise of contextualizing the citation network of scholarship with semantic analysis. Scientists’ awareness of other work is independent of their ability to understand it. Together, these complementary perspectives enhance our view of the complex relationship between scientific fields.