Content Words and Compound Structures in English-Written Astrophysical Research Paper Abstracts (2011-2021)

David Israel Méndez; M. Ángeles Alcaraz

doi:10.28914/Atlantis-2025-47.2.2

Authors

David Israel Méndez Universidad de Alicante
M. Ángeles Alcaraz

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.28914/Atlantis-2025-47.2.2

Keywords:

abstracts, research papers, astrophysics, content words, compound structures, cross-journal comparison

Abstract

The present research focuses on a series of content words (nouns, adjectives and mathematical symbols) as well as compound groups retrieved from 220 research paper abstracts published from 2011 to 2021 in leading English-written astrophysics journals. Our main finding was a high lexical density due to content words appearing more than twice as often as function words, although our results were lower than those obtained in previous studies on scientific letters and research paper titles in the same field. We also found a low syntactic complexity and a predominance of adjectival compound groups over nominal ones, an outcome which clearly contradicts the results obtained in other disciplines or even in popular science astrophysics titles. From a cross-journal perspective, our results indicate that the use of complex compound structures may be intrinsically related not only to whether English is the L1 or L2 of the author(s)/researcher(s) but also to the US-American or European areas of influence which they belong to, i.e. geographical, social, political and economic backgrounds may have a crucial influence on the process of scientific communication.

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Author Biographies

David Israel Méndez, Universidad de Alicante

David Israel Méndez holds a Ph. D. in astrophysics from La Laguna University (Canary Islands, Spain) and he is a lecturer in the Department of Physics, Engineering Systems and Signal Theory at the Polytechnic University College of the University of Alicante (Spain). He teaches undergraduate and master courses, both in English and Spanish, in fundamental engineering physics, optics and acoustics. He has published numerous research articles on astrophysics, optics, non-linear oscillations, information science and English linguistic matters in leading international journals.

M. Ángeles Alcaraz

M. Ángeles Alcaraz is now retired but was a lecturer in the Department of English Studies at the University of Alicante (Spain). She is the author of numerous research articles, conference papers and other publications on the linguistic and pragmatico-rhetorical analysis of English-, French- and Spanish-written specialised discourses (medicine and astrophysics).

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