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Lexical Profile of Academic Written English Revisited: What Does it Take to Understand Scholarly Abstracts?

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  • Nhu Le Quynh Nguy
  • Hung Tan Ha

Abstract

The abstract is an integral part of a scientific paper. Despite the importance of abstracts, very little research has investigated the vocabulary size needed to read abstracts in scientific papers. This present study analyzed the lexical profile of 26 million words from approximately 100,000 scholarly abstracts across 10 major subjects of science. The results showed that the vocabulary size of the most frequent 7,000 and 15,000 word families in the British National Corpus/Corpus of Contemporary American English (BNC/COCA) word list plus proper nouns, marginal words, transparent compounds, acronyms were needed to gain 95% and 98% coverage of the abstract corpus, respectively. However, data from cross-disciplinary analyses demonstrated significant differences in the lexical demands between abstracts of different fields of study. The 570 word families in the Academic Word List were found to make up for 13.77% of the words in the corpus. Implications for the use of abstracts in language classrooms were discussed.

Suggested Citation

  • Nhu Le Quynh Nguy & Hung Tan Ha, 2022. "Lexical Profile of Academic Written English Revisited: What Does it Take to Understand Scholarly Abstracts?," SAGE Open, , vol. 12(3), pages 21582440221, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:sagope:v:12:y:2022:i:3:p:21582440221126342
    DOI: 10.1177/21582440221126342
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    1. Lu, Chao & Bu, Yi & Dong, Xianlei & Wang, Jie & Ding, Ying & Larivière, Vincent & Sugimoto, Cassidy R. & Paul, Logan & Zhang, Chengzhi, 2019. "Analyzing linguistic complexity and scientific impact," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 13(3), pages 817-829.
    2. Tan Jin & Huiqiong Duan & Xiaofei Lu & Jing Ni & Kai Guo, 2021. "Do research articles with more readable abstracts receive higher online attention? Evidence from Science," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(10), pages 8471-8490, October.
    3. Ben H. Weil, 1970. "Standards for writing abstracts," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 21(5), pages 351-357, September.
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