Twenty synopses from Engineering Synopses and their corresponding original articles were compared for ease of reading using one of Coleman's readability formulas. The synopses were found to be significantly more difficult to read at the 2% level.
Readability is usually taken to mean the ease of comprehension of written materials and is expressed numerically. In this project, readability scores for eight guides to the literature were calculated using three readability methods. These were the Dale‐Chall, Flesch Reading Ease and Smog Grading methods. Correlation coefficients between the methods were calculated and they proved significant at the 5 per cent level. The effect of jargon words on the Dale‐Chall method is discussed.
A value for how efficient a journal circulation system is at attracting the number of readers it ‘should’ attract is estimated using the Bradford‐Zipf distribution. This method is confirmed by data from four other libraries and represents the first stage in an effort to find a series of efficiency indicators for library operations.
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