  The number of publications and the number of citations received have become
the most common indicators of scholarly success. In this context, scientific
writing increasingly plays an important role in scholars' scientific careers.
To understand the relationship between scientific writing and scientific
impact, this paper selected 12 variables of linguistic complexity as a proxy
for depicting scientific writing. We then analyzed these features from 36,400
full-text Biology articles and 1,797 full-text Psychology articles. These
features were compared to the scientific impact of articles, grouped into high,
medium, and low categories. The results suggested no practical significant
relationship between linguistic complexity and citation strata in either
discipline. This suggests that textual complexity plays little role in
scientific impact in our data sets.
