The Relationship Between Readability and Citations in Forestry Journals

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. 可读性反映了文本因写作风格而易于理解的程度。摘要是学术论文知识传播的重要窗口，其可读性不仅关系到读者对学术研究的初步理解，也可能影响学术成果的检索与传播。现有可读性研究多集中于医学、信息科学、语言学等领域，较少关注林业学术语篇。林业研究涉及自然资源保护、生态治理和环境政策制定等重要议题，探讨林业学术摘要的可读性有助于理解该领域知识传播的语言特征。本研究以2008—2021年Web of Science数据库收录的198种林业SCI期刊论文摘要为主要研究对象，共筛选出5285篇摘要作为分析样本，采用四个经典可读性指数探讨其与被引频次的关系。研究发现，林业期刊摘要整体可读性较低，读者通常需要较高教育水平和专业知识基础才能充分理解文本。随着时间推移难度呈微弱上升趋势，这与学科知识积累和专业术语增加相关。可读性与标准化被引频次之间未呈现显著相关性，但包含符号的复杂表达在林业论文引用中较不受青睐。本研究为学者探讨可读性与科学影响力的关系提供了普适性启示，在未来的学术研究写作中，建议研究者在保证摘要信息充分性的基础上，兼顾专业术语所体现的学科知识积累与文本表达的可理解性。