Making Sense and Transparency in Financial Literature : Evidence from Trends in Readability

Transparency continues to interest finance scholarship, as regards not just to financial reporting, but to a host of areas. Concomitantly, there is a growing emphasis on the transparency of the finance research process, with journals initiating requirements for uploading data and code. However, little consideration is given to the transparency of finance scholarly texts, despite new emphasis by academic institutions and accreditation bodies on articles having an impact on practitioners. We use textual analysis to investigate the readability of articles in top finance journals. Results evidence that academic articles are becoming less readable. Whether readability implies transparency is unclear, as article transparency, being the absence of information asymmetry, depends on both authors (senders) and readers (receivers). However, we consider these issues alongside our findings. Our study should be of great interest to those concerned with the state of finance scholarship