Do Linguistic Style and Readability of Scientific Abstracts affect their Virality?
This addresses how presentation impacts scientific dissemination, offering insights for researchers and publishers, but is incremental as it builds on prior work linking style to online content success.
The study investigated whether linguistic style and readability of scientific abstracts influence their virality, measured by downloads, citations, and bookmarks, and found that certain stylistic and readability features significantly affect an article's success and viral capability.
Reactions to textual content posted in an online social network show different dynamics depending on the linguistic style and readability of the submitted content. Do similar dynamics exist for responses to scientific articles? Our intuition, supported by previous research, suggests that the success of a scientific article depends on its content, rather than on its linguistic style. In this article, we examine a corpus of scientific abstracts and three forms of associated reactions: article downloads, citations, and bookmarks. Through a class-based psycholinguistic analysis and readability indices tests, we show that certain stylistic and readability features of abstracts clearly concur in determining the success and viral capability of a scientific article.