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The readability of scientific texts is decreasing over time

Pontus Plavén-Sigray, Granville James Matheson, Björn Christian Schiffler, View ORCID ProfileWilliam Hedley Thompson
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/119370
Pontus Plavén-Sigray
1Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden
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Granville James Matheson
1Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden
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Björn Christian Schiffler
1Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden
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William Hedley Thompson
1Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden
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  • For correspondence: hedley@startmail.com
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ABSTRACT

Clarity and accuracy of reporting are fundamental to the scientific process. The understandability of written language can be estimated using readability formulae. Here, in a corpus consisting of 707 452 scientific abstracts published between 1881 and 2015 from 122 influential biomedical journals, we show that the readability of science is steadily decreasing. Further, we demonstrate that this trend is indicative of a growing usage 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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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license.
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Posted March 28, 2017.
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The readability of scientific texts is decreasing over time
Pontus Plavén-Sigray, Granville James Matheson, Björn Christian Schiffler, William Hedley Thompson
bioRxiv 119370; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/119370
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The readability of scientific texts is decreasing over time
Pontus Plavén-Sigray, Granville James Matheson, Björn Christian Schiffler, William Hedley Thompson
bioRxiv 119370; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/119370

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