Citations and the readers' information-extracting costs of finance articles

摘要

This paper focuses on the relationship between the reader's information-extracting costs of finance articles and the article's number of citations. The reader's information-extracting costs are measured using three metrics: (i) the Flesch-Kincaid readability score, ( ii ) the article's length, and ( iii ) the number of complex words. Based on a sample of more than 14,0 0 0 full text articles published between 20 0 0 and 2016 in 16 finance journals, we show that the information-extracting costs of finance journals have significantly increased over time, while the topics of these articles, determined by machine-learning topic modeling, remained relatively constant. We find a positive correlation between the reader's information extracting costs and the number of citations achieved by a paper for articles that are published in the top-three finance journals (JF, JFE, RFS), but do not observe this pattern for articles published in other major finance journals. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.