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The readability of scientific papers has decreased dramati cally in the past 100 years, but now appears to have bottomed out at the ' very difficult' level. Volume and price inflationary pressures on publishers have probably been responsible for other changes in journal characteristics between 1900 and 1970 such as increased printing density and number of words and characters per journal per year.
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Bottle et al. (1983) studied this question.
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