Is the readability of abstracts decreasing in management research?

The readability of scientific texts is critical for the successful distribution of research findings. I replicate a recent study which found that the abstracts of scientific articles in the life sciences became less readable over time. Specifically, I sample 28,345 abstracts from 17 of the leading journals in the field of management and organization over 3 decades, and study two established indicators of readability over time, namely the Flesch Reading Ease and the New Dale–Chall Readability Formula. I find a modest trend towards less readable abstracts, which leads to an increase in articles that are extremely hard to read from 12% in the first decade of the sample to 16% in the final decade of the sample. I further find that an increasing number of authors partially explains this trend, as do the use of scientific jargon and corresponding author affiliations with institutions in English-speaking countries. I discuss implications for authors, reviewers, and editors in the field of management.

Using New Technology to Assess the Academic Writing Styles of Male and Female Pairs and Individuals

Background:

Previous research suggests that there are advantages to writing in groups or in pairs compared with writing individually, and that men write differently from women. However, as far as we know, no one has yet used new technology to assess published academic articles written in these different modes.

Method:

We assembled 80 papers from recent issues of the Journal of Educational Psychology as follows: 21 authored by individual men, 21 by individual women, 19 by pairs of men, and 19 by pairs of women. We then used two computer-based measures to assess various textual features of the Abstracts, the Introductions, and the Discussion sections of these 80 papers.

Results:

Several differences were found between these various parts of the journal articles (e.g., the Discussions were more readable than the Introductions and these in turn were more readable than the Abstracts). However, there were few differences between the writing of pairs or individuals, or between that of men and women.

Conclusions:

There was no real evidence to support the notion that writing in pairs would lead to better quality articles or that there would be differences between the readability of papers produced by men and women. Such differences may occur, however, before peer review.

Are the abstracts of high impact articles more readable? Investigating the evidence from top research institutions in the world

This paper examines the abstracts of the articles of the five most cited institutions in the world to determine their text reading level. Around 260,000 articles were analysed during 2000—2009 and the Flesch reading ease (RE) formula was applied to calculate the difficulty level of the abstracts according to the readability scores. The present study tries to: determine the abstracts reading level; discover the difference in the abstracts reading level among various disciplines; check the changes in the reading level of the abstracts during the examined years; test the correlation between the readability of the abstracts and their scientific impact. The results revealed that the texts of the abstracts are very difficult to read. Although this fact is true for all disciplines, disciplines can be divided into two groups based on their reading level, with some clearly less readable than others. No considerable change was observed in the readability scores of the abstracts over the examined years. Although the results of this research indicate that academics always write their abstracts in a difficult manner, these findings may result from the limitations in the readability formulas. Some researchers argue that these formulas ignore the readers’ prior knowledge, interest and motivation and, based on the findings, it is clear that academics do tolerate such apparently difficult texts (RE score).