Abstract
This study intends to describe the diachronic changes of linguistic complexity (i.e., overall, morphological, and syntactic complexity) in scientific writing based on Kolmogorov complexity, an information-theoretic approach. We have chosen the entire data (i.e., all the 24 text types including articles, letters, news, etc.) and two individual registers (i.e., the full texts and abstracts of articles) of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, the world’s oldest scientific writing journal. The Mann–Kendall trend tests were used to capture diachronic changes in linguistic complexity at three complexity levels, and the Pearson correlation coefficients were calculated to investigate the relationships between the three complexity metrics. Results showed that the overall and morphological complexity of both the entire data and full texts increased from 1821 to 1920, indicating a massive lexical expansion during this 100-year period, as evidenced by more and more word form variants in scientific writing. In contrast, the syntactic complexity of the entire data and full texts declined, suggesting a gradual shift towards grammatical simplification in the evolution of scientific writing, particularly in word order rules and syntactic patterns. A trade-off effect has also been found between syntactic and morphological complexity in the entire data. In addition, concerning abstracts, the overall and morphological complexity decreased while the syntactic complexity increased. Drawing from these results, researchers can better understand the changing linguistic complexity styles in scientific writing, thus making adjustments in their writing accordingly to garner greater attention in academia.
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This research was supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China (No. 17BYY115).
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation and data collection were performed by SXY, and data processing was carried out by all authors. The first draft of the manuscript was written by WG, SXY, WN, and WH. All authors especially WL commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Wang, G., Wang, H., Sun, X. et al. Linguistic complexity in scientific writing: A large-scale diachronic study from 1821 to 1920. Scientometrics 128, 441–460 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04550-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04550-z