“The Readability Of Scientific Texts Is Decreasing Over Time”
[no description provided]There's an interesting new paper at bioRXiv, "The Readability Of Scientific Texts Is Decreasing Over Time."
Lower readability is also a problem for specialists (22, 23, 24). This was explicitly shown by Hartley (22) who demonstrated that rewriting scientific abstracts, to improve their readability, increased academics’ ability to comprehend them. While science is complex, and some jargon is unavoidable (25), this does not justify the continuing trend that we have shown.
Ironically, the paper is released as a PDF, which is hard to read on a mobile phone. There's a tool, pandoc, which can easily create HTML versions from their LaTeX source. I encourage everyone who cares about their work being read to create HTML and ebook versions.