The Readability of Finance Articles and the Number of Citations : Can Articles Be Too Straightforward to Be Cited?

We study the readability of academic publications and its impact on article citations. We analyze 4,160 finance articles published in three flagship finance journals (JF, JFE, RFS) from 2000-2016, and find a positive correlation between reading complexity and the number of citations achieved by a paper. However, this result does not hold for 8,236 articles published in other important finance journals. The patterns suggest that researchers prefer unintelligibly written papers from leading journals when underlining the importance of their own work. This preference poses a challenge to editors and reviewers who have to evaluate the final contributions of submitted papers within the academic publication process