Abstracts, Introductions and Discussions

[J. Hartley]

Colleagues may be interested in a paper which we have just had accepted for
publication in Scientometrics.

Please e-mail me (not the list) if you would like a printed or electronic
preprint.

j.hartley at psy.keele.ac.uk

The title and abstract follow below.

James Hartley
Department of Psychology
Keele University
Staffordshire
ST5 5BG UK

Abstracts, introductions and discussions: How far do they differ in style?

James Hartley, James W. Pennebaker and Claire Fox

Two computer-based style programs were used to analyse the Abstracts,
Introductions and Discussions of 80 educational psychology journal articles.
Measures were made of the overall readability of the texts as well as of
sentence lengths, difficult and unique words, articles, prepositions and
pronouns.  The results showed that the Abstracts scored worst on most of
these measures of readability, the Introductions came next and the
Discussions did best of all.  However, although the mean scores between the
different sections differed, the authors wrote in stylistically consistent
ways across the sections.  Thus readability was variable across the sections
but consistent within the authors.