Prose and cons of scholarly articles: How readability tests expose poor knowledge mobilization in academic publications
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Current literature shows that poor and unclear writing is a significant barrier for non-academic audiences. Readability research is a growing interest among STEM and health science fields; however, the humanities and social science disciplines are neglected. To address this gap, articles from the humanities and social science disciplines were analyzed using the Flesch Reading Ease (FRE) and the Gunning FOG Index (GFI) readability tests. Results show that the FRE mean score for all analyzed articles is 29.04, and the total GFI mean score is 18.02, meaning they are extremely difficult to read and often require a post-secondary education for adequate comprehension. Empirically driven, quantitative articles had no significant difference in readability than sense-making, qualitive articles. Results also show that the humanities and social sciences have readability similar or equivalent to STEM and health science fields. ©Journal of Professional Communication, all rights reserved.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.236 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".