Abstract
This paper focuses on the issue of whether or not academic writing changes over time. We examine a selection of book reviews written by five authors over a 20–25 year period. The data show little evidence of change for each of the authors as measured by readability scores and grammatical features. These findings are in line with earlier ones that suggest that academic writing styles are fixed fairly early on and do not alter much with time.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to our third book reviewer, Eric Deeson, who contributed a great deal to this paper but declined to be an author.
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Hartley, J., Cowan, J., Deeson, C. et al. Book reviews in time. Scientometrics 109, 2123–2128 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2114-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2114-z