Analysis of the scientific literature's abstract writing style and citations
ISSN: 1468-4527
Article publication date: 7 April 2021
Issue publication date: 19 October 2021
Abstract
Purpose
The citation counts are an important indicator of scholarly impact. The purpose of this paper is to explore the correlation between citations of scientific articles and writing styles of abstracts in papers and capture the characteristics of highly cited papers' abstracts.
Design/methodology/approach
This research selected 10,000 highly cited papers and 10,000 zero-cited papers from the WOS (2008-2017) database. The Coh-Metrix 3.0 textual cohesion analysis tool was used to quantify the 108 language features of highly cited and zero-cited paper abstracts. The differences of the indicators with significant differences were analyzed from four aspects: vocabulary, sentence, syntax and readability.
Findings
The abstracts of highly cited papers contain more complex and professional words, more adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions and personal pronouns, but fewer nouns and verbs. The sentences in the abstracts of highly cited papers are more complex and the sentence length is relatively longer. The syntactic structure in abstracts of highly cited papers is relatively more complex and syntactic similarities between sentences are fewer. Highly cited papers' abstracts are less readable than zero-cited papers' abstracts.
Originality/value
This study analyses the differences between the abstracts of highly cited and those of zero-cited papers, reveals the common external and deep semantic features of highly cited papers in abstract writing styles, provide suggestions for researchers on abstract writing. These findings can help increase the scientific impact of articles and improve the review efficiency as well as the researchers' abstract writing skills.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71774084, 71503124 and 71673143) and National Social Science Fund of China (Grant No. 19BTQ062). The authors express their sincere gratitude towards Institute for Intelligent Systems, the University of Memphis, provider of Coh-Metrix tool, for their help and guidance. The authors thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful observations and suggestions.
Citation
Hu, H., Wang, D. and Deng, S. (2021), "Analysis of the scientific literature's abstract writing style and citations", Online Information Review, Vol. 45 No. 7, pp. 1290-1305. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-05-2020-0188
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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