The DOI matches its Crossref record; 41 of the 41 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The readability of scientific texts is decreasing over time
Open accessPublished version of a preprint
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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Cites
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Cited by
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Metadata
- Authors
- Plavén-Sigray, P., Matheson, G. J., Schiffler, B. C., & Thompson, W. H.
- Venue
- eLife
- Publisher
- eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd
- Published
- 2017-09-05
- Volume
- 6
- ISSN
- 2050-084X (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2888211956
- Cited by
- 257
- References
- 41
- FWCI
- 10.66
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- Licence
- creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (vor)
- creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (am)
- creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (tdm)
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- Plavén-Sigray, P., Matheson, G. J., Schiffler, B. C., & Thompson, W. H. (2017). The readability of scientific texts is decreasing over time. eLife. https://doi.org/10.7554/elife.27725
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
