Understanding writing styles of scientific papers in the IS-LS domain: Evidence from abstracts over the past three decades

To some extent, written academic discourse represents the knowledge and practices of the academic community. Studies investigating writing styles in various disciplines have flourished, but fewer studies have leveraged multi-perspective linguistic indices to analyze academic writings, especially in the information science and library science (IS-LS) domain. This study attempts to provide an overview of how writing styles have evolved over the past 30 years across various subfields in IS-LS from multiple perspectives, that is, lexical complexity, cohesion, syntactic complexity, and readability. Based on a large set of abstracts of academic papers published in IS-LS, the empirical findings showed that the readability, cohesion, and lexical sophistication of abstracts in the IS-LS domain have increased over time, indicating that abstracts tend to contain more information but become less accessible. The gradual improvement in cohesion suggests that academic writing logic has increased, and the rigor of knowledge construction of scientific papers has improved. Furthermore, considerable linguistic variations emerged between subfields in the IS-LS domain, particularly at the lexical level. This study suggested that different subfields had various writing styles due to their research topics, methodologies, orientations, etc. The study also found that papers published in top quartile journals and those that gained higher citations typically had larger lexical density, lexical sophistication, cohesion, and readability. This suggests that influential papers tend to carry more information, address more complex scientific issues, and exercise caution in knowledge construction and presentation.