Scientific papers containing lots of specialized terminology are less likely to be cited by other researchers

"Dr. Mammola wrote a computer program to calculate the proportion of jargon words in each manuscript’s title and abstract. Papers with a higher fraction of jargon received fewer citations, the researchers found. And none of the most highly cited papers — with more than 450 citations — used jargon in their title, while almost all had abstracts where fewer than 1 percent of the words were jargon.

As citations are often viewed as a metric of academic success, jargon has a negative effect on a paper, Dr. Martínez and Dr. Mammola propose. Fewer citations can mean that a paper isn’t getting read and remembered, which is bad news for science communication overall, the team concluded."