Do linguistic style and readability of scientific abstracts affect their virality?

Abstract

Reactions to textual content posted in an online social network show different dynamics depending on the linguistic style and readability of the submitted content. Do similar dynamics exist for responses to scientific articles? Our intuition, supported by previous research, suggests that the success of a scientific article depends on its content, rather than on its linguistic style. In this article, we examine a corpus of scientific abstracts and three forms of associated reactions: article downloads, citations, and bookmarks. Through a classbased psycholinguistic analysis and readability indices tests, we show that certain stylistic and readability features of abstracts clearly concur in determining the success and viral capability of a scientific article. Copyright © 2012, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.