Abstract
The linguistic style and emotional tone of thousands of tides and abstracts was analyzed for articles appearing in psychology Journals ranked among the top 5% of all cited Journals in the social sciences for 1995. Citation status was predicted by several measures of linguistic complexity: punctuation in the title, use of rare words, and sentence length. Abstracts from the top 5% group as a whole were also characterized by complexity: abstractness, low use of functional words, use of rare words, and sentence length. Categories of Journals differed in emotional tone in a manner consistent with their contents, suggesting different emotional experiences for readers. The process of abstracting is described as one involving a tradeoff between accuracy or depth of communication and clarity or breadth, with breadth being especially important in an era in which electronic methods of dissemination put abstracts within the reach of an increasingly larger group of researchers.
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