Pragmatics of User Interaction with Scientific Internet Articles

The contemporary realities of the academic sphere necessitate a shift in scientific communication to the electronic environment. This article presents a study on the peculiarities of scientists’ perception of scientific internet texts and the principles governing their actual interaction with such texts. The aim of the research is to establish how readers engage with affordances (interactive elements) in online scientific articles and what pragmatic factors shape this interaction. To achieve this, we conducted a survey, an experimental reading session involving scientific articles with affordances, and an analysis of semi-structured interviews with respondents from a targeted sample. It was found that the nature of interaction with affordances in online scientific texts is determined by two types of pragmatic factors: internal factors, which are influenced by the pragmatics of the respondents themselves, and external factors, which are related to the reading conditions. Internal pragmatic factors include the technological and academic experience of the recipient, their reading objectives, as well as their physical needs and capabilities. External pragmatic factors encompass the reading situation, the technical capabilities of the reading device, and the properties of the affordances themselves. This proposed classification is conditional, as in practice, the listed factors are interconnected and often mutually influence each other and the recipient’s behavior towards affordances. Future research on the pragmatics of the production and reception of affordances should incorporate quantitative methods.