@inproceedings{dbbfb2d480e14eed94c5aa1975846703,
title = "Measuring the readability of medical research journal abstracts",
abstract = "This study examines whether the readability of medical research journal abstracts changed from 1960 to 2010. Abstracts from medical journals were downloaded from PubMed.org in ten-year batches (1960s, 1970s, etc.). Abstracts in each decade underwent processing via a custom Python script to determine their Coleman-Liau Index (CLI) readability score. Analysis using one-way ANOVA found statistically significant differences between the mean CLI readability scores of each decade (F(4, 6689135) = 12936.91,p<0.0001). Posthoc analysis using Tukey's method also found all pairwise comparisons between decades' mean CLI readability scores to be statistically significant (p<0.001). Readability scores increased from decade to decade beginning with a mean CLI score of 16.0813 in the 1960s and ending with a mean CLI score of 16.8617 in the 2000s. These results indicate a 0.7804 grade level increase in the difficulty of reading medical research journal abstracts over time and raises questions about the accessibility of medical research for broader audiences.",
author = "Samuel Severance and Cohen, {K. Bretonnel}",
note = "Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2015 Association for Computational Linguistics; ACL-IJCNLP 2015 Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing, BioNLP 2015 ; Conference date: 30-07-2015",
year = "2015",
doi = "10.18653/v1/w15-3815",
language = "English (US)",
series = "ACL-IJCNLP 2015 - BioNLP 2015: Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Workshop",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)",
pages = "127--133",
booktitle = "ACL-IJCNLP 2015 - BioNLP 2015",
address = "United States",
}