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).