Abstract readability and online attention - an altmetric study of research articles with Finnish affiliations

Abstract

Scholarly communication is developing due to social media, and research funders increasingly demand that researchers provide proof of the social impact of research. Therefore, researchers must produce articles that attract the attention of readers. The abstract can be the determining factor if research is cited or shared online. Therefore, it is beneficial to understand how readable the abstracts are and what effect readability has on online attention. Academic texts are difficult to understand, and concerns have arisen regarding accessibility. The common readability formulas, such as the Flesch reading ease, are often used to assess text difficulty, and research has mainly focused on readability and scientific impact. This study maps the readability of abstracts using new readability assessment tools and investigates the relationship between abstract readability and online attention. Lexical and syntactic complexity tools evaluated the readability of the abstracts and Altmetric attention scores were used to assess the level of online attention the research articles received. Spearman’s correlation coefficient was used to analyse the relationship between readability and online attention. The data consisted of research article abstracts from15 research areas with affiliations to Finnish universities published in 2018. The dataset for the readability analysis consisted of 9272 abstracts. From this data, 5604 articles with at least one attention score were selected for the correlation analysis. The readability analysis showed that all research areas use similarly complex language, and research areas with higher lexical complexity generally score lower in syntactic complexity and vice versa. The implication is that the studied abstracts would be too difficult to read for general audiences. The results from the correlation analysis indicate that readability has a small impact on online attention. Depending on the research area and complexity index, the effect was either positive or negative, which provides inconclusive results regarding the influence of readability on online attention. More research is needed on readability and its effect on online attention.