Readability and Writing Quality in Radiation Oncology Journal Articles from 2004 to 2024

Purpose

Scientific literature is a vital tool that we rely on to communicate the findings of our studies; however, we rarely direct our study to the writing itself.

Methods and Materials

Here, we make use of modern natural language processing algorithms coupled with the large, open access PubMed Central corpus to analyze trends in writing complexity within the field of radiation oncology from 2004 to 2024. Changes in 1) required grade level to comprehend, 2) lexical complexity, and 3) information content were assessed. Articles were also classified, and then analyzed, by disease subsite.

Results

We found significant increases in the 3 domains over the 20-year collection period. Genitourinary literature had the greatest readability, while gastrointestinal literature was the most complex.

Conclusions

This analysis reveals broad increases in the complexity of our writing. This study demonstrates metrics to use and benchmark values to refer to when evaluating the complexity of radiation oncology journal articles.