The Readability of Scientific Texts is Decreasing over Time

Overview

Journal Elife

Specialty Biology

Date 2017 Sep 6

PMID 28873054

Citations 41

Authors

Pontus Plaven-Sigray

Granville James Matheson

Bjorn Christian Schiffler

William Hedley Thompson

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Clarity and accuracy of reporting are fundamental to the scientific process. Readability formulas can estimate how difficult a text is to read. Here, in a corpus consisting of 709,577 abstracts published between 1881 and 2015 from 123 scientific journals, we show that the readability of science is steadily decreasing. Our analyses show that this trend is indicative of a growing use of general scientific jargon. These results are concerning for scientists and for the wider public, as they impact both the reproducibility and accessibility of research findings.

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