# Examining Scientific Writing Styles from the Perspective of Linguistic Complexity

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.08374 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08374/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jul 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Examining Linguistic Shifts in Academic Writing Before and After the Launch of ChatGPT: A Study on Preprint Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12218/) (2025)
- [Lost in Context? On the Sense-wise Variance of Contextualized Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09669/) (2022)
- [Examining the Cognitive Gap Between Authors and Peer Reviewers on Academic Paper Novelty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13452/) (2026)
- [Do Reviewers Still Reward Lexical Complexity? A Frozen-Rater Study of Preference Drift in 124K ICLR Reviews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08475/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Publishing articles in high-impact English journals is difficult for scholars around the world, especially for non-native English-speaking scholars (NNESs), most of whom struggle with proficiency in English. In order to uncover the differences in English scientific writing between native English-speaking scholars (NESs) and NNESs, we collected a large-scale data set containing more than 150,000 full-text articles published in PLoS between 2006 and 2015. We divided these articles into three groups according to the ethnic backgrounds of the first and corresponding authors, obtained by Ethnea, and examined the scientific writing styles in English from a two-fold perspective of linguistic complexity: (1) syntactic complexity, including measurements of sentence length and sentence complexity; and (2) lexical complexity, including measurements of lexical diversity, lexical density, and lexical sophistication. The observations suggest marginal differences between groups in syntactical and lexical complexity.