Some stylistic variations in scientific writing

The work reported in this paper suggests that some of the syntactical and stylistic characteristics of scientific writing can be used to assess the degree of specialization of such writing. Two groups of articles, dealing with the same subjects but differing in degree of specialization, were compared. The texts of the more technical articles were found to have a lower percentage of function words and a higher number of noun adjuncts than the texts of the more general articles. Some differences between the writings of two different fields-Psychophysics and Genetics-were noted.