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

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-31-2024

Publication Title

Practical radiation oncology

Abstract

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.

Volume

S1879-8500

Issue

24444

First Page

00161-9

DOI

10.1016/j.prro.2024.06.013

ISSN

1879-8519

PubMed ID

39089623

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