Know your audience: how language complexity affects impact in entrepreneurship science

Artikel

This article addresses the importance of tailoring publications to expectations of the intended scientific sub-community it addresses. But what does this mean when writing an article and adopting community specific jargon? This article disentangles the effects of articles' language complexity on their impact. In the domain of entrepreneurship science, we show that language uniqueness (in form of aligning jargon uniquely to one community) has a positive effect on article's impact. An article's novelty (in form of novel recombination of community jargon) has an inverted U-shape relationship with impact. We further show that the optimal level of novelty decreases with increasing uniqueness, yielding higher overall impact. These findings have implications not only for authors of scientific articles but also for their audience.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Journal: Journal of Business Economics ; ISSN: 1861-8928 ; Volume: 91 ; Year: 2021 ; Issue: 7 ; Pages: 1025-1061 ; Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Management ; Entrepreneurship ; Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Language; Social and Economic Stratification
• Subject: Entrepreneurship science ; Language complexity ; Language uniqueness ; Novelty ; Natural language processing ; Bibliometric analysis

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Lampe, Hannes W. ; Reerink, Jan
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Springer
• (where): Berlin, Heidelberg
• (when): 2021

Further information

• DOI: doi:10.1007/s11573-020-01027-4
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:42 AM CET