Do Linguistic Style and Readability of Scientific Abstracts affect their Virality?

TL;DR

This study investigates how the linguistic style and readability of scientific abstracts influence their popularity and virality, revealing that stylistic features significantly impact article success.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that stylistic and readability features of abstracts affect scientific article virality, challenging the assumption that content alone determines success.

Findings

Certain stylistic features correlate with higher downloads and citations.

Readability indices are predictive of an article's virality.

Linguistic style influences reader engagement and sharing behavior.

Abstract

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.