Changing readability of scientific writing: a data mining approach to studying language evolution

Scientific writing has become increasingly less readable over time. However, few studies have examined diachronic changes in readability by comparing academic abstracts with full texts. Taking the journal Science as a specific case, our research examined diachronic changes in the readability of both abstracts and full texts of research articles published between 1997 and 2021, and explored how linguistic features may have influenced these changes in readability. The findings of this study show that in Science research articles, abstracts have evolved to be less readable than full texts over time. An increased presence of certain linguistic features may have implicitly contributed to the observed decline in readability, which is further examined and analysed in this study. Finally, this study discusses the implications of its findings for academic researchers and the broader scientific community.