Do Linguistic Style and Readability of Scientific Abstracts affect their Virality?
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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1203.4238,
title = {Do Linguistic Style and Readability of Scientific Abstracts affect their Virality?},
author = {Marco Guerini and Alberto Pepe and Bruno Lepri},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1203.4238},
year = {2012}
}
Comments
Proceedings of the Sixth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2012), 4-8 June 2012, Dublin, Ireland