Readability and prestige in scientific journals

Abstract

This paper reviews studies that have been made of relation ships between a journal's readability and its prestige. After discussing the concepts of readability and prestige, and how they might be measured, the authors review ten experimental studies (i) which have mampulated the textual difficulty of extracts from journal articles and examined their prestige ratings, or (ii) which have calculated correlation coefficients between readability measures of journal articles and the journals' pre stige rankings. It is concluded that, in the main, there is little evidence to support the notion held by some that prestige is inversely related to reading difficulty. In practical terms it has not been found easy to measure satisfactorily either prestige or readabil ity. It is concluded, nonetheless, that reliable methods of assessing the difficulty of journal articles could have useful applications.