The Dynamics of Collaboration: A Scientometric Study of Team Size and Text Complexity in Scientific Abstracts from Bangladesh

The geography of scientific collaboration has become increasingly internationalized, transforming where and how research is constructed and communicated. While collaboration has been shown to impact scientific production and impact, much less is known about how it interacts with the linguistic characteristics of scientific communication. This study analyses the extent to which team size has an impact on the linguistic features of scientific abstracts from scholars with Bangladesh affiliations. Using the full population of 25,883 WoS publications (1972–2023), I assess the differences in three relevant linguistic characteristics - readability, lexical diversity, and abstract length - based on collaboration type (solo, small groups (2 authors), medium groups (3–5), large groups (6–10) and very-large groups (> 10 authors)). Readability is assessed through the Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and Gunning FOG Index while linguistic diversity is assessed through the Type-Token Ratio (TTR). The findings reveal three primary conclusions. First, lexical diversity is negatively impacted by team size in which greater linguistic inclusivity was found within collaborative endeavour’s as team size increased. Second, readability behaves according to a curvilinear pattern whereby 6–10 author teams produce the easiest-to-read abstracts and > 10 author teams produce more concise, complex works. Third, abstract length is positively impacted by team size due to the broader conceptual and methodological scope of collaborative efforts. Mean differences for readability relative to team size are statistically significant (ANOVA; p  < 0.001) as a negative trend of reading ease from 2019–2024 reveals a decrease for all group sizes. This study contributes to the emerging field of Scientometrics - by connecting structures of collaboration to assessable linguistic features in practical applied scientific output for communication purposes. Practical applications are made for research evaluation, journal editors and writing specialists who teach novice researchers in burgeoning research fields how to produce such collaborative findings effectively while best anticipating expectations. Ultimately, these results indicate that researchers should welcome access to linguistic features in evaluation of collaborative efforts as communication does not come without cost when collaborative scientific writing occurs.