A comparison of the readability of abstracts with their source documents
Rosemary King · Journal of the American Society for Information Science · 1976
Abstract Readability levels of 30 items from Child Development Abstracts and 30 passages from their corresponding journal articles were compared by a CAL SNOBOL computer program referenced to a cloze criterion. The difference between mean predicted cloze restoration percentage scores of 26.77 for abstracts and 30.37 for articles proved to be significant beyond the .05 level. Results supported the hypothesis that abstracts were more difficult to read than their source documents, but indicated that perhaps both types of materials were too hard for undergraduates.