Lexical richness of abstracts in scientific papers in anglophone and non-anglophone journals

Abstract

Journal research article abstracts, considered as the most read section of the entire paper, have been the focus of multi-dimensional research studies. In the genre of abstracts, vocabulary richness is the basis for the construction of sentences, paragraphs, and complete texts; it contributes to non-native (and even native) English speakers of the language in the production and comprehension of written texts. To explore its importance, the present study examines the lexical richness in abstracts of scientific papers; it consists of three distinct measurement dimensions: lexical density, lexical variation, and lexical sophistication. The comparative-descriptive analysis is based on a corpus of abstracts in English published in Anglophone and non-Anglophone contexts. The written corpora were subjected to a software-driven text analysis using the complete lextutor vocab-profile available online at https://www.lextutor.ca/vp/eng/; the output texts from the software analyser were mined using SPSS statistics. Results show that although abstracts in both publication contexts use varied and extensive vocabulary throughout the two English sub-corpora, Anglophone texts, unlike non-Anglophone ones, produce more content and off-list words. This study announces valuable insights, particularly for inexperienced and novice writers, on using automatic online tools, such as vocab-profile, to gauge the type of vocabulary used in their written compositions.