Measuring the readability of medical research journal abstracts

Samuel Severance, K. Bretonnel Cohen

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

10 Scopus citations

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.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationACL-IJCNLP 2015 - BioNLP 2015
Subtitle of host publicationWorkshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Workshop
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages127-133
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)1932432663, 9781932432664
DOIs
StatePublished - 2015
Externally publishedYes
EventACL-IJCNLP 2015 Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing, BioNLP 2015 - Beijing, China
Duration: Jul 30 2015 → …

Publication series

NameACL-IJCNLP 2015 - BioNLP 2015: Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Workshop

Conference

ConferenceACL-IJCNLP 2015 Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing, BioNLP 2015
Country/TerritoryChina
CityBeijing
Period7/30/15 → …

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Health Informatics
  • Language and Linguistics
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Information Systems
  • Software
  • Biomedical Engineering

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