Changes in scientific articles over two hundred years: a coh-metrix analysis

We analyzed texts from years 1800-2004 from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Two-thousand-word sections from about 20 articles published at 25-year intervals (1800, 1825, 1850, etc.) for a total of 127 articles were analyzed by a new tool (Coh-metrix) developed by McNamara, Louwerse, and Graesser [9] at the University of Memphis’ Institute for Intelligent Systems. The study discerned significant differences in four general measurement areas: word information, connectives, causal cohesion, and syntactic complexity. Specifically, there was a significant decrease in concreteness, imagability, number of causal verbs, number of causal particles, number of connectives (including total number of connectives, and positive temporal and causal connectives), and the mean number of higher-level constituents per sentence and per word. We also found a significant increase in age of acquisition, syntactic complexity (measured in mean number of modifiers per noun phras...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: SIGDOC
• Authors: Michell Bruss, Michael J. Albers, Danielle McNamera
• Keywords: Causal, Mean Number, SIGDOC 2004, Syntactic Complexity