The Relationship Between Readability and Citations in Forestry Journals
School of Foreign Languages, Central South University of Forestry and Technology, Changsha 410004, China
| Abstract: | Readability refers to the ease of understanding or comprehension of a text due to the style of writing. As an important window for knowledge dissemination in academic papers, the readability of abstracts is not only related to readers’ initial understanding of academic research, but may also affect the retrieval and dissemination of scholarly findings. Existing readability studies have mainly focused on fields such as medicine, information science, and linguistics, while relatively little attention has been paid to forestry academic discourse. Forestry research involves important issues such as natural resource conservation, ecological governance, and environmental policy-making. Therefore, examining the readability of forestry abstracts can help reveal the linguistic features of knowledge dissemination in this field. The present study examined abstracts published in 198 forestry journals indexed in the Web of Science database from 2008 to 2021. A total of 5,285 abstracts were selected as the analytical sample. Four classic readability indexes were utilized to analyze the readability of forestry abstracts and its relationship with citations. The results showed that forestry abstracts are generally difficult to read, and readers usually need a relatively high level of education and disciplinary knowledge to fully understand the texts. The difficulty of the abstracts increased slightly over time, which may be related to the accumulation of disciplinary knowledge and the increasing use of technical terms. The study found an insignificant relationship between readability and the normalized citations via correlation analysis. However, complex expressions with symbols are less preferred in forestry article citations. This study provides general implications for scholars to further investigate the relationship between readability and scientific impact. For future academic research and writing, it is suggested that researchers should ensure the informativeness of abstracts while also taking into consideration both the disciplinary knowledge reflected by technical terms and the comprehensibility of textual expression. |
| Keywords: | Readability; Citations; Abstracts; Forestry |
| DOI: | 10.57237/j.ssrf.2026.03.006 |
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Received: 7 May 2026
Accepted: 5 June 2026
Published Online: 13 June 2026
Funding
| 1. | 湖南省社科基金项目―林学英语学术词表开发与应用研究II (项目编号: 23YBA116) |
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