Abstract readability: Evidence from top-5 economics journals

Belicia Rodriguez, Kim Huynh, David Jacho-Chávez and Leonardo Sanchez-Aragon

Economics Letters, 2024, vol. 235, issue C

Abstract: Readability is a measure of how easy it is to read a text. Over time, general-interest journals have become more technical. This affects how accessible research is to a general audience. Our analysis looks at how readable abstracts are. We study the readability of abstracts of top five economics journals between 2000–2019. We collect the characteristics of the abstracts, papers, and authors of these papers. We find that abstracts with higher proportion of women co-authors are more readable. These results are robust to various readability measures and model specifications.

Keywords: Flesch–Kincaid; Readability; Lasso (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A1 C21 C51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176524000259
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:235:y:2024:i:c:s0165176524000259

DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2024.111541

Access Statistics for this article

Economics Letters is currently edited by Economics Letters Editorial Office

More articles in Economics Letters from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().