| Abstract: | It is a classical research issue in bibliometrics that what factors affect the citation frequency of academic articles. Previous studies have mainly focused on the relationship between the content or formal characteristics of articles and the citations they received, while few studies shed light on the issue from the perspective of readability, which is an integral component of the content characteristics of an academic article. A critical factor concerning the efficiency of knowledge dissemination and the recognition of the research is to what extent readability affects a reader's understanding and absorbing of the information in the article. This study aims to examine the impact of text readability of an article on the citations it received. The articles published from 2016 to 2020 in the well-known journals of Chinese library and information science were used as the research sample. The readability of the research sample was measured by the R-value algorithm, which is proposed by JING Xiyu of National Kaohsiung Normal University. The R-value is the most scientific readability indicator in analyzing Chinese test since it was designed to evaluate the readability of Chinese textbooks for primary and secondary school. Meanwhile, the fact that an article uses or does not use a compound title, formulas, tables, and figures was used as four complementary variables to measure the readability of the research sample. Additionally, the quality and authority characteristics of articles were under control to investigate the impact of readability on the citations of articles. The co-authorship and the number of references were used as the quality indicator of an article. The journal prestige, author's job title, and institutional hierarchy were used to control the halo effect of citations received for an article. The publication age was used to control the cumulative effect of citations over time. It has been found that the readability R-value of articles, whether or not using a compound title, and the presence or absence of formulas and tables in the text has a significant impact on citation frequency, while the presence or absence of figures has no significant impact on citation frequency. The study verified that readability does play a substantial role in the impact of an article in the Chinese scientific communication context. Furthermore, the research data shows that authoritative factors, time effects, and references number have significant impact on citation frequency in the Chinese scientific context, and the impact effect is relatively robust. However, co-authorship has a very limited effect on increasing citations. The results indicate that it is important for Chinese researchers to improve their academic writing skills for better readability and peer recognition as well as endeavor to publish results in higher-level journals to gain more attention from the academic community. 3 tabs. 83 refs. © 2023, Editorial Office of Journal of Library Science in China. All rights reserved. |
