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SMU Journal of Undergraduate Research

Abstract

Scientific communication is typically tied to promoting public engagement and interest in science, increasing scientific literacy, and playing an essential role in policymaking. The success of public communication of scientific findings is largely associated with secondary characteristics of research (e.g. the style of writing and presentation), rather than the primary content or research quality. But it is unclear to what extent the success of scientific literature intended for working scientists is influenced by those same secondary characteristics. Does the writing style of scientific articles impact their success in academic spheres? In this study, we explore the stylometric and formal characteristics of published articles in astrophysics journals, searching for notable differences in articles with low- and high-citation counts. We find that a naive "far reading" perspective based in regression and surface-level metrics like lexical diversity and sentence length largely fails in correlating writing style metrics to citation count and ensemble classification shows only a moderate degree of success. We additionally use a literary approach to examine the formal qualities of select articles in scientific literature as "close reading" case studies. We find that the formal qualities of highly successful articles don't align with the conception of scientific literature as solely means of communicating results, and high-citation articles spend considerable effort on qualitative explanations, justifications, and a human agency-filled style, meaning these are the qualities that must be considered in future "far reading" analyses.

Faculty Mentor/Sponsor

Eric Godat and Rajani Sudan

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Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

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