The Readability of Academic Papers in the Journal of Property Investment & Finance (JPIF)

1. The Readability of Academic Papers in the Journal of Property Investment & Finance (JPIF) Stephen Lee Cass Business School and Nick French Oxford Brookes University

2. Introduction: On the MSc Degree I use a number of articles from journals for teaching purposes (usually mine) and refer the students to many others. In addition, students do a dissertation which usually involves a literature review. So do the students understand what they are reading? In other words how readable are real estate Journals?

3. Introduction: The aim of the JPIF is to keep industry practitioners informed on current thinking and developments in all aspects of real estate research and practice by informing and encourage debate between academics and practising professionals. To achieve this aim the Journal seeks to: “publish well-written, readable articles of intellectual rigour with a theoretical and practical relevance to the real estate profession.” However, nothing is known about the readability of academic papers in real estate journals.

4. Readability: In this study readability is defined as the: “ease of understanding or comprehension based on the style of writing” (Klare, 1963). It is usually assumed that a particular passage of text is easy to read if it has simple words and short sentences. Therefore, most readability tests concentrate on these two dimensions of the sampled text to estimate its readability, but differ in how they measure the average simplicity or difficulty of words within a sentence and how they measure the average length of the sentences. Consequently there are more than 200 methods!

5. Readability: • So we use five educational level readability tests, designed to identify the number of years of education needed to read the text, and average the results across the tests: • Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL) index, • Fog index, • SMOG index, • Automated Readability (AR) index and • Coleman-Liau (CL) index. • In addition, we also calculated the Flesch Reading Ease (FRE) index, which varies between 0 and 100, as it is the most widely used, reliable and tested formula and as some readability researchers consider it the most appropriate test for technical documents.

6. Research Design: In order to asses the readability of academic papers in the JPIF we followed the approach in previous work and took the text from the introductions of all articles in all the issues of JPIF from Vol. 21 to Vol. 27, which resulted in a total of 190 papers. The Flesch formula recommends a minimum sample size of 100 words; our samples ranged from 101 to 2678 words (one papers exclude only 51 words). We took all samples from the introductory section of each article because sampling from the same section in each article increases the comparability across articles and across time. In addition, sampling at this point avoids the most technical sections of the articles and so we can assess the authors’ communication skills, without the distraction of the technical aspects of the research methods.

7. Figure 1: Histogram of Average Grade Scores Average 15.5 = graduate level

8. Figure 2: Histogram of Flesch Reading Ease Scores 99% Difficult and above! 50% 47.4% 47.4% 50%

9. Results: Comparisons with previous work: Crosier (2004) mean FRE 33.7 with a range of 10.7 to 57. Loveland et al (1973) average FRE score across the journals was 33.5 with range of 20 to 54. Bauerly, et al. (2005, 2006) examined the readability of the Journal of Marketing from 1936 to 2001 and found the Journal’s readability level had dropped precipitously in the late 1960s and has remained in the Flesch “very difficult” range ever since. Thus, the mean score of 30.2 for the sample of academic writing in this study is similar to the result for other studies of academic papers

10. Conclusion: Unless the sample that generated these findings is unrepresentative in some systematic way, a FRE score of 30.2 and an average reading educational level of 15.5 places the academic papers in the JPIF firmly in the “difficult” range with the reader needing a graduate educational level in order to understand the text. Does having a low FRE score, or a high educational reading level, make the JPIF too difficult to read? Not necessarily, because the readability scores used here are but one measure of an article’s readability. Another factor is the education level of the audience. So should I expect the students to understand them?

11. PS: The Flesch Reading Ease score of the introduction to this article is 41.8, which would have ranked this paper as about the 26th easiest paper to read of the 190 articles in our analysis, while the Average Grade Level score suggests that the reader only needs 12.1 years of schooling, i.e. high school senior level. ☺☺☺

12. The Readability of Academic Papers in the Journal of Property Investment & Finance Any Questions?