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Readability is decreasing in language and linguistics

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Abstract

Readability reflects the ease of reading a text and high readability indicates easy texts. Based on a corpus consisting of 71,628 abstracts published in SSCI journals in language and linguistics from 1991 to 2020, this paper employs nine readability indexes to analyze their readability and relationship with citations. The results show that the readability of abstracts in journals of language and linguistics is low. Moreover, in the past 30 years, the abstract readability in language and linguistics abstracts is decreasing. Meanwhile, readability is significantly negatively correlated with the number of citations, even though the effect size is very small. The results above suggest that abstracts are very difficult to read; they are becoming more and more difficult than before; the abstract of the articles with more citations appear to be less readable. Faced with decreasing readability, it is suggested that scholars make themselves understood when expressing their ideas with jargon. This study not only has implications for scholars to use linguistic features to improve readability, but also provides quantitative support for the research on readability.

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Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the University of Macau (MYRG2019-00013-FAH).This work was performed in part at the high performance computing cluster (HPCC) which is supported by Information and Communication Technology Office (ICTO) of the University of Macau.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Macau, Taipa, Macau SAR, China

    Shan Wang, Xiaojun Liu & Jie Zhou

  2. Institute of Collaborative Innovation, University of Macau, Taipa, Macau SAR, China

    Shan Wang

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  1. Shan Wang
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  2. Xiaojun Liu
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  3. Jie Zhou
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Correspondence to Shan Wang.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Tables 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14.

Table 6 Flesch Reading Ease scores and categories
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Table 7 Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level scores and categories
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Table 8 Gunning Fog Index scores and categories
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Table 9 Coleman–Liau Index scores and categories
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Table 10 New Dale–Chall scores and categories
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Table 11 Automated Readability Index scores and categories
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Table 12 SMOG Index scores and categories
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Table 13 Linsear Write Index scores and categories
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Table 14 Spache Index scores and categories
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Appendix 2

See Tables 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and 23.

Table 15 Descriptive statistics of the Flesch Kincaid Grade Level of the abstracts
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Table 16 Descriptive statistics of the Flesch Reading Ease of the abstracts
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Table 17 Descriptive statistics of the Dale Chall of the abstracts
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Table 18 Descriptive statistics of the Automated Readability Index (ARI) of the abstracts
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Table 19 Descriptive statistics of the Coleman Liau Index of the abstracts
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Table 20 Descriptive statistics of the Gunning Fog index of the abstracts
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Table 21 Descriptive statistics of the SMOG index of the abstracts
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Table 22 Descriptive statistics of the Spache index of the abstracts
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Table 23 Descriptive statistics of the Linsear Write index of the abstracts
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Wang, S., Liu, X. & Zhou, J. Readability is decreasing in language and linguistics. Scientometrics 127, 4697–4729 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04427-1

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