Jargonness

Jargonness is a piecewise mathematical function mapping the frequencies of a word's appearance in scientific and contemporary English corpora to a parameter quantifying the word's association with scientific jargon - the "jargonness" of that word. It is expressed mathematically as :"$jargonness = \begin{cases} log \left ( \frac{f_s}{f_g} \right ), & f_g > 0 \\ 3, & f_g = 0 \end{cases}$" In the above equation, $$f_g$$ stands for the frequency of a word's appearance in a general English-language corpus and $$f_s$$ stands for its frequency in a scientific corpus.

Method of use
Both the frequencies ($$f_g$$ and $$f_s$$) must be determined and then substituted in the above equation to calculate the word's jargonness. In case a word has no mention in the general English corpus, 3 is taken as its jargonness as suggested by the second part of the equation. Noticing that the logarithm in the first part of the equation is a common one (to the base 10), this simply means that the word is assumed to be a thousand times more likely to appear in a scientific text than a non-scientific one.

Examples of corpora
The corpora that have most commonly been employed to determine the frequencies mentioned above are the following:


 * Professional English Research Consortium Corpus (for scientific vocabulary; 17 million words)
 * British National Corpus (for common vocabulary; 97 million words)