Scientific impact analysis: Unraveling the link between linguistic properties and citations

Abstract

The Scholar's success is indicated by the number of citations it received for its publication. Examining the correlation between the linguistic attributes of scholarly publications and their scientific influence holds significant importance. This study analyzed 1000 research papers by highly ranked authors from computer science and electronics backgrounds. The title, abstract, and conclusion sections of the paper were analyzed. This study utilizes readability, lexical diversity, lexical density, syntactic features, and coherence measures to establish the correlation between citations and the textual content of an article. The characteristics of the publication were evaluated in relation to its research impact, which was classified into two categories, high citations and low citations. Additionally, the influence of various aspects on citations was assessed through the utilisation of the negative binomial regression model, ordinary least square model, and spearman correlation. This analysis took into account the characteristics of length and structure. The results highlight a clear positive link between abstract readability, and number of references with increased citations. Additionally, each additional page contributes to a 0.2 % increase in citation count. However, the number of diagrams and conclusion readability show no significant connection with citations. Factors like title length, abstract length, and conclusion length also exhibit associations, though with slightly lower percentages. The results indicate that linguistic characteristics exert a limited impact on the acquisition of citations.