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

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.