  Scholarly text is often laden with jargon, or specialized language that can
facilitate efficient in-group communication within fields but hinder
understanding for out-groups. In this work, we develop and validate an
interpretable approach for measuring scholarly jargon from text. Expanding the
scope of prior work which focuses on word types, we use word sense induction to
also identify words that are widespread but overloaded with different meanings
across fields. We then estimate the prevalence of these discipline-specific
words and senses across hundreds of subfields, and show that word senses
provide a complementary, yet unique view of jargon alongside word types. We
demonstrate the utility of our metrics for science of science and computational
sociolinguistics by highlighting two key social implications. First, though
most fields reduce their use of jargon when writing for general-purpose venues,
and some fields (e.g., biological sciences) do so less than others. Second, the
direction of correlation between jargon and citation rates varies among fields,
but jargon is nearly always negatively correlated with interdisciplinary
impact. Broadly, our findings suggest that though multidisciplinary venues
intend to cater to more general audiences, some fields' writing norms may act
as barriers rather than bridges, and thus impede the dispersion of scholarly
ideas.

Computation and Language;Digital Libraries