The Role of Scientific Language in Citation Count and Altmetric Score of Academic Publications

Objective: Writing in plain language is recommended in all communities, including the academic community, and researchers are consistently encouraged to write their research findings and papers in a simple manner. One principle of plain language is the use of simple vocabulary. In other words, researchers are encouraged to use fewer technical terms and jargon in their writing and instead opt for simple and understandable words. However, it is unclear whether plain language can lead to increased impact of research papers. This study aimed to answer this question by examining a selection of articles from the journal 'Applied Linguistics.' The primary objective of this research was to understand the role of scientific language in the number of citations and Altmetric scores of research articles in the 'Applied Linguistics' journal.

Method: This research was conducted in two key steps: (1) content analysis of scientific articles to determine the extent of the use of technical terms and jargon, and (2) extracting data related to the impact of scientific articles, such as the number of citations and Altmetric scores, and comparing this data with the extent of the use of technical terms and jargon. Articles from the 'Applied Linguistics' journal were selected both purposefully and randomly. The software 'MAXQDA' was used to identify the number of difficult words, and the 'Dimensions' platform was used to identify the impact of these articles.

Results: The findings showed that the highest proportion of difficult words in the examined articles was 1.76%, and the lowest was 0.15%. In other words, in the most difficult article (among the research sample), there were nearly 18 difficult words per thousand words. On the other hand, the average field-weighted citation rate for the selected articles was around 24. Statistical tests showed a negative correlation between the use of difficult words in articles and the number of citations/Altmetric scores, but this relationship was not statistically significant, and therefore the research hypotheses could not be confirmed.

Conclusions: This research indicated that there is no significant correlation between plain language and the impact and attention given to academic works. Therefore, it cannot be claimed that the simpler academic texts are, the more attention they receive.