The present study analysed the readability of abstracts and full texts of the articles published in four journals of information science from 2003 to 2012. The results showed that the abstracts are very difficult to read in terms of readability indices such as FRE and SMOG. The results also showed that some of the readabilities of the abstracts and full texts changed in the examined decade, though the effect sizes were minuscule. Meanwhile, the readability scores were not significantly correlated with the number of citations. Although the readability issue of an academic text is secondary to t...