Examining Scientific Writing Styles from the Perspective of Linguistic Complexity
This addresses challenges in scientific publishing for non-native English speakers, but the findings are incremental as they reveal minimal stylistic differences.
The study analyzed over 150,000 PLoS articles to compare English scientific writing styles between native and non-native English-speaking scholars, finding only marginal differences in syntactic and lexical complexity.
Publishing articles in high-impact English journals is difficult for scholars around the world, especially for non-native English-speaking scholars (NNESs), most of whom struggle with proficiency in English. In order to uncover the differences in English scientific writing between native English-speaking scholars (NESs) and NNESs, we collected a large-scale data set containing more than 150,000 full-text articles published in PLoS between 2006 and 2015. We divided these articles into three groups according to the ethnic backgrounds of the first and corresponding authors, obtained by Ethnea, and examined the scientific writing styles in English from a two-fold perspective of linguistic complexity: (1) syntactic complexity, including measurements of sentence length and sentence complexity; and (2) lexical complexity, including measurements of lexical diversity, lexical density, and lexical sophistication. The observations suggest marginal differences between groups in syntactical and lexical complexity.