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Examining scientific writing styles from the perspective of linguistic complexity
Author(s) -
Lu Chao,
Bu Yi,
Wang Jie,
Ding Ying,
Torvik Vetle,
Schnaars Matthew,
Zhang Chengzhi
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
journal of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.903
H-Index - 145
eISSN - 2330-1643
pISSN - 2330-1635
DOI - 10.1002/asi.24126
Subject(s) - linguistics , lexical density , lexical diversity , perspective (graphical) , sophistication , sentence , computer science , academic writing , set (abstract data type) , linguistic sequence complexity , computational linguistics , lexical item , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , sociology , vocabulary , social science , philosophy , programming language
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. 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: (a) syntactic complexity, including measurements of sentence length and sentence complexity; and (b) lexical complexity, including measurements of lexical diversity, lexical density, and lexical sophistication. The observations suggest marginal differences between groups in syntactical and lexical complexity.