Year of Award

2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Other Degree Name/Area of Focus

Psychology

Department or School/College

Department of Psychology

Committee Chair

Lucian Gideon Conway, III

Commitee Members

Daniel J. Denis, Rachel Severson, Allen Szalda-Petree, Stephen Yoshimura

Keywords

scientific communication, integrative complexity, elaborative complexity, linguistic complexity, citations, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Abstract

Through language, scientific communication can positively impact the progression and advancement of science. Given the value of scientific communication, it is important to explore what factors might be associated with influential scientific communication. Surprisingly, relatively little research has examined the linguistic properties of influential scientific communication. In effort to overcome this gap in the literature, I used integrative complexity, a well-validated linguistic variable, to assess the relation between article abstracts and subsequent number of citations from one of the most highly-cited social psychology journals (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology). In an analysis of over 1.4 million words from 9,884 abstracts, results reveal that elaborative complexity predicts number of citations, whereas dialectical complexity does not. These findings are further highlighted by the predictive power of defensive complexity (elaborative-dialectical complexity). In other words, complexity used to multifacetedly defend a singular perspective, absent of complexity used to evaluate alternative perspectives, is predictive of subsequent citations of articles from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. I conclude by discussing implications for the construct of integrative complexity, limitations of the current findings, and directions for future research.

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